Post Password Token

The Post Password Token plugin lets you issue secret urls that allow readers to access protected content without having to enter a password. It extends the default WordPress post password protection functionality by creating secret urls to the post that have an encoded token. This is similar to the guest pass functionality that can be found on Flickr.

Who is it for?

Sometimes you would like to share your blog posts with a specific group of people, but not with the wider world. For example, a family might want to blog about their adventures together for friends and family, but would rather not broadcast this to everyone. WordPress provides for this scenario by allowing you to password-protect a post. Unfortunately, we’ve found through experience that a lot of our friends never make it past the password form. Either they mis-type the password, are confused about what it is, or are simply scared off by an intimidating form.

The solution: give password-protected posts a secret url that can be shared with friends and family. The url allows your select audience to see the content without the confusion and hassle of an authentication form, while hiding the special content from search spiders and the wider-world. You can revoke secret urls at any time, so if a secret url gets to someone you don’t want it to, you can simply invalidate it.

The Details

The encoded tokens are made by taking the post-name and post-password and encoding them together. The plugin’s admin page also allows you to create a “salt”, or a unique key that makes the resulting encoded token more secure. Please note that once the salt option is set, changing it will change the secret urls for all posts. Unless you want to invalidate all of your old secret urls, it is recommended that you set the salt and leave it.