Not long ago, a friend of mine was applying for a new design job and they wanted to place a special post that they had created in their site just for their potential new boss. However they were not in a position where they could let their current employer know they were job hunting so hiding this post was critical. While you can set any page or post in WordPress to be password protected, it’s hardly a creative or interesting option.
Since sending a password in a cover letter didn’t seem like the way to go, they took the step of creatively using some information from the cover letter to allow their prospective employer to find the post. To make that work, I set up a multiple choice Gravity Forms form where you could find the hidden post only if you answered some questions correctly. Here’s how you can do the same thing.
Create Your Secret Page
First on our list is to create the secret WordPress page for our potential boss. Include any content you need to. The important part of this is to use a URL for your page that’s difficult to guess. To do that, click right under your post title where it says “edit” (it’s next to the permalink) and change the URL ending to something random and like “afajdfik98nfj28tnvala932h98t92.”
If you’re using a SEO plugin or a XML sitemap plugin, make sure to set those so they do not index this page or list it in your sitemap. There’s no need to attempt a secret page if you’re just going to tell Google where it is.
Once you’ve done that, go on and publish your page and then copy the full URL to it. We’ll need the URL in just a minute.
Create Your Form
Create a New Form
Secondly you’ll want to create a form to use. Enter a title and description if you’d like to and begin adding in your fields. For our purposes, we’re going to first need a “multi-select” field which you can find in the “Standard Fields” section in the top right. Add that to your form.
The options we make here will form the key for our lock so to speak. In this situation, we’ve included our favorite smoothie type in our cover letter that we sent to the new agency. So for my multi-select options, I want to include the ingredients in the smoothie as well as some other ingredients so that it’s harder to guess. The more options you include the harder it will be to randomly guess the combination so use as many as you need to.
Setting up selections
After we have the options created, we’ll want to check the “Enable enhanced user interface” box as this will give us a nice select option for our form.
The only other field we have to have is a HTML block. Add it to your form and in the content, you’ll want to create a link to your secret page like this:
[html] <a href=”http://yoursite.com/secret”>Click here to view the secret page.</a>[/html]
Just replace the http://yoursite.com/secret with the URL to your secret page. Then click the advanced tab, click the “Enable Conditional Logic” box and set the conditions that have to be met for this field to be visible.
Set the Conditions
In our example, we want the link to display when the visitor has correctly selected our favorite smoothie. I have three ingredients that have to be correctly entered for the link to be visible: Guava, Bananas and Peanut Butter. You can select them in any order, but if you don’t include all of them, the lock won’t open.
Once you have that set, you can publish your form. Since it’s not being submitted, we don’t need to set up notifications here.
Bringing It All Together
Now you can create a page or post that where you’d like to insert our new lock form. You’ll want it to be someplace visible so that your potential employer can find it quickly.
Post before the lock is “opened”
All they need to do now is enter your favorite smoothie ingredients and they can access your secret page.
Success!
Now, obviously you don’t want to do this with anything that absolutely must remain secret because someone could stumble upon the secret page. Since it’s not actually secure, that could happen. That said, it is rather unlikely that would happen.
So that’s my fun alternative to mundane WordPress post passwords. If you have any off the wall uses for Gravity Forms, share them in the comments.