Documents not protected

Hi warcowan,

I am not currently using this plugin, but an looking for plugins that will do similar things, restrict access to certain parts of my site, including PDF documents. I would therefore be interested in finding a solution to your problem. At the moment, from reading around this topic, the ideal way would be to embed the document into your page (there are several plugins to do this). If you then protected the page with the embedded PDF you should then have a basic restriction to PDFs. My understanding is that you will still not be able to restrict access to the direct link to the PDF but it may be harder for the average user to find it, obviously viewing the page source will reveal the direct link to the document. Therefore I would try and restrict access to the uploads folder via .htaccess I have to emphasise that I have to tested this and at the moment it is just my thoughts. I don’t know if restricting access to the folder via .htaccess with spoil the way WordPress operates. I would be interested in seeing others points of view

Unfortunately, this isn’t something the plugin forces since no php or WordPress script runs prior to loading the static files (.pdf, .doc, .jpg…etc). It just loads the file.

If you want to restrict access to the uploaded media files, you’ll have to configure your server to pass or “proxy” all requests to the uploads folder through a php script that can check if the user is logged-in.

Check out the following URL for an example of how to do this:
https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/a/37743/48165