Creating a client area on a photography site

Captain Flaps

I badly need to build a client/customer area on my site. Currently, I just link my clients to a password protected directory on the server, but this is a rather inelegant solution. I've seen a few systems in place that do this, they work in a variety of ways.

I'd either like to have a box where you enter a keyword to access your photos, or just have a password box appear in browser (not a pop-up) when a client selects their job from a list. Does anyone have any experience with this stuff? The site is based on the Wordpress platform so the perfect solution would be if it could be integrated into that, but it's not the end of the world if I have to link to an external page.

Heebie

Have you checked into what wordpress plugins are available?

To do that right, and protected the content from being perused by the wrong clients, could be complicated.

Back when I was in the business, we used a service in the U.S. called "LifePics" which had a "pro site" product available, where as a pro, you could upload the pics to the site, and the customers could login with a password you provided them, and order prints directly from the site (at prices you would set, with fulfillment by LifePics)

There's probably a similar service you could sign up for here somewhere. (and the photographer retained all copyright to the images etc..) It would save you having to do development work. I'm fairly certain there are other similar sites.

TinyExplosions

With wordpress it's fairly straightforward with a few plugins.

I've used one with a Login Redirect and a Role Manager plugins to create a user that has access to a single page, that is then password protected. The Login Redirect will guarantee that the user is always directed to 'their' page, and only they (and you as admin) can see the page, everyone else gets a password prompt