15

Creating Member-specific Content

If you have a coaching program, or have clients for whom you’re doing custom work (like if you were a teacher, CPA, web designer, personal trainer or coach) and wish to publish content that is available to and downloadable by only that specific client/student/customer, then there are THREE ways in which you can do Member-Specific Content in DAP.

1) BEST SOLUTION: Using a combination of a special page for each member PLUS DAP’s “For Your Eyes Only” Shortcode

2) Creating Separate Products for each Member

3) Using DAP’s “For Your Eyes Only” Shortcode

Let’s take a look at each one in detail.

SOLUTION #1: BEST OPTION: Special page for each member PLUS DAP’s “For Your Eyes Only” Shortcode

This is partly manual, partly automated, but is the absolute best solution for multiple reasons, as explained below.

1) For each new member, you would create a separate page. So, for Joe Customer, you would create a new page in WP – http://YourSite.com/joe-customer/

This page would be created after someone has become a member, of course. But creating a WP page for every member will probably take you about what, 30 seconds? So it’s not going to be a big deal (unless you wish to make it one 😉

2) Then, assuming Joe Customer’s “userid” in DAP is 144 (you can find this out on the Users > Manage page). So within the above new page, you would add the following shortcode…

[DAP userId=”144″]protected content[/DAP]

(See DAP’s “Member-Specific Content” Shortcodes )

3) You can start adding any amount of private content between the shortcode start and end tags (where you see protected content above).

4) You can use a simple, free plugin like Exclude Pages to make sure the customer’s page http://YourSite.com/joe-customer/ does not show up in any of your menu’s. Even if it did, it’s not like anyone else can see the contents of the page – only Joe Customer – after he’s logged in to DAP – can see the contents of the page. So it’s secure from everyone else.

Solution #2: Separate Products for each Member

Here, you would create separate products, one per member – and only give that member access to that product. The advantage here, is that you can protect the entire page (not just the content section) and make it available just to that one client, so you can be a lot more creative with this page, use special templates, add sidebar widgets that show content just for that client, use the commenting system to communicate back and forth with the client.

So if you had a client named John Customer, then you would create a DAP Product by name “John Customer”, then take John’s email id and give John access to his product.

And within this DAP Product, you would’ve protected files, pages and posts that only John should get access to. So since only John has access to the product, only he can get access to the content protected as part of this product.

Obviously, it takes a few minutes of additional setup per customer to create a DAP Product specifically for him, but then the few extra minutes of creating a DAP Product would be nothing compared to the few hours (or tens of hours) that you’re actually going to be taking to create the actual custom content for John. So it’s a very small overhead compared to the whole process, where you are actually creating custom content for each member.

Solution #3: No special pages, just DAP’s “Member-Specific Content” Shortcode

If you wish to automated this a bit more than Option #2, then one way is to implement this is using DAP’s “Member-Specific Content” Shortcodes, which look like this:

Using the “userId” parameter in the DAP shortcode, you can now protect a piece of content so that only John Customer (who has the user id “144” in your membership site) user can see it.

[DAP userId=”144″]protected content[/DAP]

So on a single page, you may publish a number of these shortcodes, with content meant only for specific members protected within those shortcodes.

And doesn’t matter which one of your members visits the above page, they will all only see content intended only for them, and will be unable to see content intended for others.

So those are the three ways in which you can create Member-Specific Content.

Member-specific Chat Room

Using our WPChatR Chatroom plugin for WordPress, you can also create a separate page per user, then put a chat room on that page specific to that user, so you can have unlimited back-and-forth real-time or off-line chats with one specific member.

Click Here to Leave a Comment Below 15 comments
Karen Dimmick - October 20, 2011

I’m trying to use method 3 with the shortcode and while it protects the content well, if i have say 2 users each will see their own protected content, however each also gets a message saying they don’t have access to the content (ie the other person’s content) – how do i turn the message off so they just don’t know other content is even there? Cause this is going to get extremely confusing for members…
Thanks

Reply
Veena Prashanth - October 20, 2011

Karen,

Set errMsgTemplate to “” (empty string) in the shortcode.

This way the users will see relevant content and nothing about the other user.

Reply
Karen Dimmick - October 20, 2011

Thank you! Thank you!!!
That worked like a dream – and thanks for the wonderfully fast response too 🙂

Reply
Jaime Monreal - February 28, 2012

i have setup in DAP a page that i want protected…this page will contain content that i want only paid subscribers to view and should not be visible to the public…however, when i navigate to the page, i can see the page and all its content with the DAP login displaying beneath the content…how can i get this page to actually be protected?

Reply
Veena Prashanth - February 29, 2012

Jamie,

Looks like you have turned on “Sneak Peek” (Setup > Config), but have not inserted the “More” tag into any of your posts/pages ?

Sneak-Peek and More tags go hand-in-hand.

See http://www.digitalaccesspass.com/doc/partial-content-protection-using-sneak-peek/

Veena

Reply
hans - October 16, 2012

Hello,
is it possible to hide or show menus or part of them only for certain users (e.g. with a paid membership)
Best regards Hans

Reply
Veena Prashanth - October 17, 2012

Hi Hans,

DAP will automatically show/hide protected items in the menu based on user’s access to the protected content. The protected items to which the user does not have access will not be displayed in the menu. You can set this option to “Yes” in dap setup -> config (WordPress Related section) to show protected links in menu :

Show protected (and not-dripped-yet) links in menu

Reply
Anna - August 27, 2013

I’m using method 3 above and need to setup one page to have a group of 10-20 members view one set of specific content, while another group of members views their specific content only.

So my question is can I setup the member ID’s into one long string like this:

[DAP userId=”1″,”2″,”3″,”4″,”5″,”6″ errMsgTemplate=””]Content Goes Here[/DAP]

Or do I have to input each member separately, like this:

[DAP userId=”1″ errMsgTemplate=””][DAP userId=”2″ errMsgTemplate=””][DAP userId=”3″ errMsgTemplate=””]Content Goes Here[/DAP][/DAP][/DAP]

Thank you in advance!

Reply
Veena Prashanth - August 27, 2013

Hi Anna,

Try using :

[DAP userId=”1,2,3,4,5,6″ errMsgTemplate=””]Content Goes Here[/DAP]

Reply
Anna - August 27, 2013

Hi Veena, Thanks for the quick reply back. Yes, I tried using that way first and the page shows up blank. I will keep experimenting. Thanks again! 🙂

Reply
Veena Prashanth - August 28, 2013

Hi Anna,
I just tested it. It will work if you are on DAP LiveLinks 1.8.3.2. If you are on older version of livelinks /dap, it won’t work.

Thanks,
Veena

Reply
Anna - August 29, 2013

Hi Veena, Thanks so much for your reply back.

Yes, I’m using DAP LiveLinks 1.8.3.2 (and running the latest version of DAP, as well as the current WordPress) but I still can’t get the member-specific content feature to work when including multiple members.

I’ve used all different variation types, but nothing works. Do you think it could be a conflict with the OptimizePress theme that I’m using?

I’m open to any ideas or suggestions you may have.

Thank you,
Anna

Reply
Veena Prashanth - August 29, 2013

Hi Anna,

>> I’ve used all different variation types, but nothing works. Do you think it could be a conflict with the OptimizePress theme that I’m using? << Are you on OP 2.0? If yes, then it's possible that it's a conflict or a OP 2.0 beta issue. Can you temporarily switch to a different theme and see if it works ? Also, see if it works with 'default' page template.

Reply
Norm - December 30, 2015

Hello Veena,

Just trying to work with this a bit to give specific members access to protected content on the Member Home Page and came up with a couple issues.

It seemed to work well as far as displaying content, however, if I go to the Member Home Page without giving my test membership access, it shows: Sorry, you do not have access to this content”.
This is good for that particular content, but perhaps confusing to the user who actually “does” have access to content below?

Also, when I placed the code on the site, I lost all menu categories at the left of the site for navigational purposes.

It works well for me other than these 2 things.

No doubt, I’m doing something wrong in the setup?

Reply
Veena Prashanth - December 30, 2015

Hi Norman,
Looks like you might have protected the member home page in DAP Content Responder in addition to using the shortcode.

Please check if you have protected it under any of your DAP products. If yes, then it will override the short code and that might be causing this issue.

Thanks,
Veena

Reply

Leave a Reply: