I had a WordPress site requirement where only logged in users could see the site and it’s contents. I came across this bit of code a few years ago and found it to be helpful. Place it into your functions.php and when a visitor comes along who is not logged in, it’ll redirect them to the wp-login.php page to login. Once logged in, then they can view the site without being blocked. This is an example where it can help keep unwanted visitors away from the content of your site. It’s been working great and I wanted to share it.
WordPress – Redirect based on IP or return 404
I had a situation recently where I needed to have a WordPress permalink redirect clients if they were an “authorized” IP address. Everyone else would get a 404. An example of this would be if you had a super long URL that you wanted to keep private, but wanted an easy-to-remember URL to access it. You should be able to access it from home, but everyone else would see a 404. A quick way to remember a URL without sacrificing security. Here’s how I did it. Add the following to functions.php for your site’s theme. It breaks down to: if the page being requested is ID 100, and your client’s IP matches the dynamic DNS hostname IP in $ip, then you’ll get redirected [Read More…]
WordPress – Accessing external database
I wanted to post this quick tip on how to access an external database, or an external table, from within WordPress. This is mostly here for my reference in case I need it in the future. Hopefully it helps you out, too. I have a table that’s external to my primary WordPress installation that I needed to get some information out of. In my functions.php, I added this piece of code into a function I already had, and it worked great. It’s a simple bit of code that just counts the number of entries in the “data” table. This snippet uses the the database login and password information from your wp-config.php. If you need to specify different login information, just change the DB_USER and DB_PASSWORD to [Read More…]
The purpose of this site is for me to share my DIY technical experiences as a place to document them publicly. Hopefully somewhere along the way they are helpful for you.