Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of Richard Korts
Richard KortsFlag for United States of America

asked on

Can't shut off access to a WordPress page.

A customer wanted me to terminate an offering on their web site. This s a WordPress site. I removed the page from the web site menu and marked the page itself as private. When a customer uses that page, it winds up sending a email to me & others with details of the purchase.


I have received 4 such emails since I took this action yesterday. I'd prefer to leave the page there as the offering will be restarted in January.


How can prevent access without removing the page entirely?

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of David Favor
David Favor
Flag of United States of America image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Avatar of Richard Korts

ASKER

David,

I see the attached. I cannot see a way to change the status. I suppose I could put a password on it?

Thank you.

no status changeable.PNG
Never mind, I changed it to password protected, then it allowed me to set it to draft.

One of the many reasons I HATE WordPress. Incredibly hard to do the obvious.

Richard
To effect the state of a page/post you must have privilege/authority to make the change.

You'll either have to login with an admin account (by far easiest) or some other account which is allowed to change the page.

The attached image suggests you have "owner edit" privilege for the page, but not "editor full page control".

Likely solution is just to login as an admin user.

At least, that seems to be the issue.

This might also have something to do with how the site was initially tooled.

If you're already logged in as an admin user, then likely this relates to site tooling.

WordPress, like Linux, let's you accomplish the same target outcome 100s of different ways, so the original site designer might have used a plugin or page builder which is effecting how you're seeing page status.
+1 for your comment, "I HATE WordPress".

We've all been there... at 2AM... with a site circling the drain... in the middle of a launch...
I have admin. It was more complex, I'll detail it later ass you might find it interesting. Off to get my 2nd Covid Booster now
David,

After I put the page in draft mode AND password protected it, 4 more customer purchases still came through.

Then it occurred to me that the WordPress page was just an empty page called service-agreement. The content was in a custom php page called page-service-agreement.php in the wp-content folder in the theme folder. Since I have all those on my own system, I deleted it on the server. Then I went to site-name.com/service-agreement and it showed service-agreement-test. I then deleted the server page page-service-agreement-test,php. Now WordPress shows the page Service Agreement Test with no content but the title, so I think I've cut it off.

I presume when you type in an entry like site-name.com/service-agreement, WordPress looks for anything that starts with service-agreement and goes from there. Is there a way to make it NOT do that?

Thank you,

Richard
If you're still logged in to the site, you'll probably see the draft page. Try browsing to the URL when not logged in, or use a private/incognito browser window. Also, do you have caching of some sort turned on?