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.
