So I’ve played with role scoper most of the day today .. and I’m pretty sure I can give you a quick and dirty breakdown on how to start privatizing parts of your blog. I’m going to assume that you 1, have wordpress and 2, know how to install plugins. And with that, go download, install and activate [role scoper].

Now you can start writing private posts! Go ahead and start a new post. On the right hand side of the Add New Post screen, make sure you change your Visibility to Private (not Password Protected or Public) in the Publish box. This will make sure that your posts will remain private if something happens to the role scoper plugin. Then scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll see 3 boxes from the Role Scoper plugin called Readers, Contributors, and Editors. I only use the Readers box and ignore other other two because I’m the only Contributor and Editor for my site. To restrict the post to certain people click the “Restrict for Post (only selected users/groups are Readers)” checkbox at the top of the Readers box. Click the Users text link next to the Groups tag to bring up a list of your site’s users (I’ll get back to groups in a minute). Then write your post, tags, select your categories and click the Publish button and you’re all done! Easy huh?

Say you have a group of ‘Friends’ who you dont mind having access to a post. Create a group by going to Users > Groups. Type in a name for your group and select your subscribers that you want in that group and click Create. Now if you want a whole group to have access to a post follow the directions as above, but instead of selecting Users, just select your group Make sure you’re clicking the ‘Restrict’ checkbox at the top of the Readers box. 

Now, to restrict an entire category! For example, I’d like to hide all my subbing posts so that only my ‘Friends’ can read them. Go create a category, I suggest you make new categories for your private posts, otherwise you risk people realizing an old category has disappeared. 

First you’ll need to restrict the category in role scoper. This will hide the category and posts by default to everybody. Click Restrictions > Category. Either click the name of your category in the list at the top, or scroll down until you find your category. Then make sure you click the ‘Private Post Reader’ and ‘Post Reader’ checkboxes for the category you want to hide. Now, scroll back up to the top, make sure you select ‘Restrict Selected Categories’ in the first drop box, then decide if you want to restrict this category, the subcategories or both the main category and the subcategories. So far .. I’ve always selected “for selected category and sub-categories”, because I want to make sure if I end up putting a sub category its hidden too Go ahead and click Update. Now nobody (but yourself) will be able to read posts that you put into your new category. So we have to go ahead and allow who you want.

Click Roles > Category. Either click the name of your category in the list at the top, or scroll down until you find your category. Click the checkboxes next to ’Private Post Reader’ and ‘Post Reader’. Scroll back to the top. Select your Assignment mode (again I’ve been using “Assign for selected and sub-categories”), you’ll notice that “Remove” is at the bottom of the list, you’ll select that if you want to remove permissions to a category. Click checkboxes next to groups or users that you want to have access to all posts in your selected category. Click Update, and you’re all done! If you create a new post and put it in your restricted category .. only those groups you gave permission to will see it. 

A couple of issues … 

• If you use the_category in your template, and you tag a public post with a private category .. that category will show to everybody. But if a user clicks it who doesn’t have access .. it will bring up a 404 page (they wont be able to see whats in that category, might just think its an error).
• RSS feed will become http://domain.com/feed/?http_auth=1 (if you have permalinks on) and will show private posts that the user has permission to view. However .. Google Reader and Safari do not currently support HTTP Authorized feeds. But if you click the RSS link in Firefox, it will show up as a live bookmark with the private posts .. so I know it works. If you have an RSS reader that does support HTTP Auth feeds that you trust (and works for Mac as well as PC)
• If you tag a private post, it might show up in the tag cloud, but if you click the tag it wont show private posts unless you have access. I haven’t experimented with this enough to be able to tell you if a tag used exclusively in private posts will show up in a public tag cloud. 

Finally, Role Scoper has their own [usage guide] which is much more detailed, and may have better ways to do what I described above. 

So far I’m pretty happy with this plugin and how transparent it seems to be.