On a membership site, search can list the titles and descriptions of pages a visitor cannot open. Member-aware results checks every result against the person searching and hides anything they cannot see.
It is part of PRO and off by default.
Turn it on:
Open AiX Search, then Settings, click PRO Settings, and under Search Power tick Member-aware results: hide content the visitor cannot open. Click Save PRO Settings.
What it does:
Before results are shown, each one is checked against the current visitor:
- Password protected pages are hidden
- Anything that is not publicly published is shown only to someone allowed to read it
- Your membership plugin can add its own rules, as below
A visitor who is not signed in and a signed in member can search the same words and get different, correct results. The typo tolerance retry follows the same rule, so a Did you mean only appears when the visitor can open what it found.
Working with a membership plugin:
The plugin asks one WordPress filter, rasp_user_can_view, for the final say on each result. It receives the current answer, the page ID and the user ID. A membership plugin, or a developer, can hook into it to apply membership levels, so search follows exactly the same rules as your content.
For example, a developer could hide every page in a category called members-only from anyone who is not signed in:
- add_filter( 'rasp_user_can_view', function ( $ok, $post_id, $user_id ) { if ( ! $user_id && has_category( 'members-only', $post_id ) ) { return false; } return $ok; }, 10, 3 );
The Pick up where you left off and Most popular lists always use this same check, so they never list a page the member cannot open.
A note on speed:
Each result is checked one by one, so this does a little more work per search. On a paid membership site that is well worth it.
A real example:
The Home Bakery Club keeps its Christmas recipes on a password protected page until December. With member-aware results on, nobody sees that page in search until the password is removed.
Tips:
- Test it by searching while signed out in a private browser window, then signed in as a member.
- See Privacy And What Gets Recorded for what Member Activity stores.