**Please move this to the correct forum if I have posted incorrectly. And-- apologies. **
As serendipity would have it, I keep running into posts online about how to restrict access to a WordPress site to users on a company LAN. I am not part of a LAN but have been in the past. Yes, there is the local server and A record/firewall-access method and a subdomain approach. There are drawbacks. I did some brief research and noted that none of the Visibility settings are a good choice. I then found Private Site plugin which is no longer supported for WP with Gutenberg and All In One Intranet I do not know if there are other similar plugins yet, that might make set up fast/easy.
However, I am posting here because I thought "Oh, this might be something that could be another USP for ClassicPress as a Business CMS. Ask the plugin author of the Private Site script to maintain it for ClassicPress or write a better one. When I was on the faculty years ago of a local university, we loved internal only websites – for courses, in particular, and ran into hiccups here and there, interestingly enough. This could be marketed to faculty, who have some freedom to choose, as well as business. "
There are 20K installs of the first plugin and 5K of the second one. The first works up to 5.0.7 WordPress.
I wondered what others thought before I delete this idea from my brain It appears I have a lot of ideas but not many that are sticky.
A plugin is not the right way to do this. The best way is to serve the site from an address that is only accessible from inside the desired network. Another way is to only allow access to specific IP addresses using the web server configuration (usually the .htaccess file).
Yes, if you reread my post, you’ll see I mentioned several other ways. I simply saw plugins that make it easier for the many people I see who get stuck when you give them DNS / A record instructions and got to thinking.
@easternwawoman your thinking is not wrong, per se.
However there is something to consider:
Using a plugin is easy. I mean that kind of easy one gets when doing something without understanding what he is doing, just happy it works somehow, until… The plugin works no more. For a plethora of reasons. But since it was so easy the person never investigated what plugin was doing.
Result: site down, user at a loss.
Teaching them the process, for DIFFICOULT it may seem, in the first place keeps them informed on what is going on. Secondly protects them. If in the end, after understanding a little more of the matter, they still risk the use of a plugin for this, they at least know what it does and what needs their attention in case it doesn’t work.
I wouldn’t have mentioned it but I just have happened to keep running into a surprising number of people who have been posting on StackExchange, Reddit, WordPress.org and elsewhere re their inability to do something I don’t consider particularly difficult. As people seek ease and time is money in business… well… that’s the backstory as to why I put it out there.
