Restricted Posts and Pages are only Partly Hidden

One of the distinguishing features of Suma’s operation compared with other Membership Management systems is that viewers who don’t have access to a Post or Page are still given some indication that it exists.

Suma achieves this by replacing certain elements of a Post or Page (e.g. the body, parts of the body, comments or excerpts) which are not accessible by the viewer with messages explaining that they don’t have permission to view this information and how they can obtain it. Suma gives the site’s administrator the ability to choose which of these elements are to be displayed (See Visibility of Restricted Posts Setting and Suma ShortCodes).

The advantages of this approach are:

  • Lets the viewer know what they’re missing.  A well written title and excerpt can inform the visitor of what the post or page is about without revealing its details.  It can thus generate interest in the article and persuade the visitor to subscribe to your website to read the entire article.
  • Allows the depth and breadth of content on your site to be revealed even if the content is not accessible.  If your site’s content is extensive (an important factor in search engine rankings) then using this approach will ensure that coverage is reflected to the public.
  • Lets search engines do a better job of indexing your website.  Using this approach search engines will be able to view key elements of the page such as keywords found in the excerpt and meta-tags you have added.  Whereas if the page were hidden from non-members then search engines would encounter a generic not-found page which would lack content specific to that page that is essential for the engine’s ability to properly rank it.
  • Doesn’t interfere with other approaches.  This approach doesn’t interfere with or prevent you from using Wordpress’ native access controls to either hide a page completely or password protect the page through its Visibility attribute.

See Also: