If you’re running a site with a lot of private pages, it can be a bit unwieldy to point users in the right direction. Private Content Login Redirect takes care of that for you, redirecting guest users to the login page whenever they stumble on private pages.
What’s it Do?
Quite simply, whenever a user who is not logged in visits one of your private pages (pages or posts that you have published as “Private”), they will be redirected to a log-in page. The default behavior is for users to see a 404 page, which can be a bit confusing. Private Content Login offers a bit of a better user experience, especially for membership sites.
And that’s it.
How’s it Work?
Whenever you publish a post or page, regardless of post type, you can mark a post as private by setting the “Visibility” in the Publish meta box to Private. A private post means that only logged in users will be able to actually view a post. With Private Content Login Redirect set up, guest users (users not logged in) trying to access these pages will be automatically redirected to your login page.
Setting it up is about as easy as activating the plugin. Once you’ve done that, it will just start working. If you want to turn the functionality off, you can deactivate the plugin.
Costs, Caveats, Etc.
Private Content Login Redirect is a free plugin, hosted on WordPress.org. There’s been a couple of changes, mostly to fix some small bugs and keep up with computability of the latest version of WordPress. Other than that, if you happen to spot a problem, you should visit the support forums.