[pswanson22]

I am setting up a school web-site and I want to have forums for parents, students and teachers. The first two forums should be open to anyone who is registered, but the Teachers forum needs to be password protected. What is the best way to do this? Plugins like eMember seem to be more set up for paid levels of access, not to having a list of users that can access.

I know it’s possible to set up a password on a regular WordPress page – is this possible for a forum as well? Could I just pick a password, give it to the teachers and be done?

The site is at http://tech.unishanoi.org.

Thanks in advance for helping!

[Stephen Edgar]

It can be done with just WordPress and bbPress but is not a good experience as basically we only have partial support thus far and a fair amount of work needs to be done to have it work ‘out of the box’

Checkout Pippin’s ‘Restrict Content Pro’ and his bbPress extension along with S2Member and Members. Those three seem to be quite popular though I have limited experience with any of them 😉

https://wordpress.org/plugins/restrict-content-pro-bbpress/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/s2member/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/members/

[Robin W]

I’m tinkering with a plugin as a challenge (by the time I’ve finished Stephen and JJJ will have written it into the core!) which I hopefully will finish in a week or so.

In the meantime I documented a version that uses a Justin Tadlocks’ members plugin and Tehnik BBPress Permissions

http://www.rewweb.co.uk/creating-bbpress-groups/

This seems to work, but I would suggest you test the bbpress search functions (it’s on my list to do) to ensure it hides posts from search results. If not, and you can live without search, then just disable search in forums

Layout and functionality – Examples you can use