This is how I do it and I don’t know if this is the best way or anything but at least it works for me:
To limit the access to one particular page (or some pages) so that only logged in users can reach it, I make a new page template for that purpose and then I put this bit of code in the beginning of the template (right after the <?php /* Template Name: anything_you_want_to_call_it */ ?> ):
<?php if ( !is_user_logged_in() ) {
nocache_headers();
header(“HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily”);
header(‘Location: ‘ . get_settings(‘siteurl’) . ‘/wp-login.php?redirect_to=’ . urlencode($_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’]));
header(“Status: 302 Moved Temporarily”);
exit();
}
?>
(I’ve copied this code almost directly from the Angsuman’s Authenticated WordPress Plugin and it redirects nicely to the login-page and then, after logging in, takes you back to whatever page you tried to reach. So I like that, but of course you can just as well decide that something else should happen to your not logged in visitors).
Then of course this page-template has to be chosen for the page or the pages you want to restrict access to.
In the same way I also hide some parts of the content within the templates that I don’t want people to se if they’r not logged in. It could for example be the links to the pages they don’t have access to, like this:
<?php if ( !is_user_logged_in() ) wp_list_pages(‘exclude=4,21’ );
else
wp_list_pages( ); ?>
Guess that if you want different access for different groups you could use something like the Role Manager-plugin and, for example, assign everyone in committee 1 to the new role “committee 1” and everyone in committee 2 to the role “committee 2”. Then create a new capability for each of the roles, lets say that you are naming them “access one” and “access two” .
Then, you can make one page-template for each group/committee in the same way as I did in the example above except that you change the part of the code saying “( !is_user_logged_in() )” to “( !current_user_can( ‘access_one’ ) )” in the committee 1 page-template, and “( !current_user_can( ‘access_two’ ) )” in the committee 2 page-template.
