After some time looking at the various user-restriction/membership style plugins, I realized that there wasn’t a quick and easy way to ban normal users from all of the wp-admin pages.
Fortunately, wordpress makes this sort of customization easy with its amazing API. These four lines of code are all that’s needed:
function my_wp_admin_ban(){
if( !current_user_can('activate_plugins') ){
wp_redirect( get_bloginfo('wpurl') );
exit;
}
}
add_action('admin_init','my_wp_admin_ban');
You can get this working in two ways:
- Copy the contents above into a file named wp-admin-ban.php (put them between ) and move it to wp-contents/mu-plugins folder. If the mu-plugins folder doesn’t exist, create it. This will be available across any theme on your site.
- Copy the code to your theme’s functions.php file, which restricts functionality to that theme.
If you can think of a good membership plugin on the wordpress repo that does the trick, feel free to drop me a line!
On that note, here’s two plugins you might find useful:
- My own ajax login plugin so users can log in and register with smooth ajax effects from the front of your site!
- Membership Plugin If you’re looking for a good premium membership plugin with great support (personally recommended, tried a few others before it). They also have a lite free version for you to try out.