Jonathan Hensley | The Blog | JHensley.org

Just before the arrival of my 2nd daughter I launched a new Wordpress site so we’d be able to keep family and friends up to date with the latest pictures and goings on.  We’d previously tried this but after a couple weeks it would start to fizzle to one post a week, then one a month and so on to basically a dead site.

The first couple sites were ones I was building in Dreamweaver with static pages that all had to be updated by hand. Part of the reason in the past that we didn’t just use a blog site was because we wanted pictures and sensitive information to be password protected.  Family blogs are different in that respect. You aren’t looking to get huge viewership, you just want to be able to share private photos, videos and stories that you wouldn’t share with the entire world.

Long story short it was never easy enough to post, much less for my wife to be able to post, there were security issues and password communication problems with family, etc.  There were just too many obstacles to overcome to create a successful family blog…  until now.

Finally! This time we got it right.

Thanks to the help of this post on Simply Basic, I decided on Wordpress and a pile of plugins. Surprisingly it works nearly flawlessly, is easy to use, my wife can post with ease (and therefore posts more often), it’s secured, family can all have their own login, and much, much, more.

Here are some more details on setting up your own secure Family Blog.

How it all works:

When we publish a new post on our family site we use the Email Users plugin to notify user of the new post.  You can choose to email a specific user, users or everyone (the user can optionally opt out of these emails in their user configuration panel).

When someone goes to my family site the Members Only plugin redirects to the Wordpress login screen which displays BM Custom Login which shows my custom login page.  Users can login with their account or register for one.  When a user registers for an account Force User Field Registration asks them for their first and last name in addition to the default request for username and email address (you need this so you know exactly who is registering so you know whether or not you want to approve their account).

When the user submits the request for an account, WP User Moderation intercepts the request and instead of immediately emailing the user their password it emails me asking me to approve the account.  Once I approve the account in the Wordpress admin panel the user gets their password email.

When the user logs into the site they are now able to view all the posts on the site. The user can access their account to change their email address, etc. Hide Dashboard prevents the user from seeing the Wordpress Dashboard.

The Plugins:

• BM Custom Login
  Display custom images on the Wordpress login screen.
• Email Users
  Allows the site editors to send an e-mail to the blog users.
• Force User Field Registration
  Forces new users to register additional fields such as First & Last name, etc.
• Hide Dashboard
  Hide Dashboard from non-Administrators
• Login Logger
  Log the most recent successful login for each user, as well as all unsuccessful logins
• Members Only
  Allows you to make your WordPress blog only viewable to users that are logged in. You can also protect your Feeds whilst allowing registered user access to them by using Feed Keys.
• WP User Moderation
  Allows to make registration requests to your Wordpress Website subject to Approval.

(One thing to note is the fact that this setup utilizes 3rd party plugins and therefore won’t work on Wordpress.com but you need to get a hosted site that offers Wordpress.org.  But if you want to do anything other than a basic blog Wordpress.org is a given.)

Once the plugins are installed, customization is easy.  Most of the plugins just do their job out of the box.  You can customize the email users get with their account info, customize the login page graphics, etc.  One other thing I did was create accounts for the close family and friends that I knew would want them.  Once I approved the account it emailed everyone their username and password.

I consider this setup a solid configuration and recommend it to anyone who wants a private family site.  It’s simple to use and it works great.  If you are interested in setting up this type of family site feel free to contact me if you have questions or if you just want me to set the whole thing up.

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