Access Areas for WordPress

Because the plugin can only protect posts, which are database entries. A media also contains a
file stored on your servers file system. A file is normally just returned by the server, the
WordPress core is not involved. In order to protect a file, let’s say an image, the Image URL
would have to be point to a special Script, that decides whether the file is protected or not,
and if so, which user or group of users would be granted access.

A lot of processing would be going on, and each and every little thumbnail would add another
one or two seconds to your page load time. The result: Tears, rage and support requests.

For each Post it stores a capabilty the user needs to have in order to view, edit or comment on a post.
By defining an Access Area you create nothing more than a custom capability.

I did this mainly for performance reason. For detecting the reading-permission on specific content,
the plugin mainly affects the WHERE clause used to retrieve posts. In most cases, using post_meta
would mean to add lots of JOIN clauses to the database query, slowing down your site’s performance.

It makes changes to your database, but it won’t make a mess out of it. Upon install it does two things:
1. It creates a table named ´{$wp_prefix}_disclosure_userlabels´. The access areas you define are here.
2. It adds three columns to Your Posts tables: post_view_cap and post_comment_cap.

Upon uninstall these changes will be removed completely, as well as it will remove any custom generated
capability from your user’s profiles.

Developer documentation can be found in the project wiki.

Please do so in the GitHub Repository.

Pull request are welcome in the GitHub Repository.