Protected Content Widget

MemberMouse provides an easy way to create drip content schedules allowing you a large amount of flexibility in time-releasing content to your members. We also provide a Protected Content Widget so that you can easily display available and upcoming content to your members any place your theme has a placeholder for widgets.

Note that the Protected Content Widget is used to display protected content only. If you want to display content that is publicly available, use the Recent Posts or Pages widgets which are installed by default with WordPress.

Adding a Protected Content Widget

1. From the WordPress Appearance menu, click the Widgets link.
   
   
2. In the Available Widgets area, locate the MM Protected Content widget.
   
   
   
   
3. Drag the widget from the Available Widgets area on the left to any sidebar on the right. You can use as many instances of the protected content widget as you want.
   
   For example, you could have one for displaying the last 10 pieces of content and one for the next 5 pieces of content to be released in a specific category. Once a widget has been added to a sidebar, it will appear like this:
   
   
   
   
4. Using the Configuration Options section as a guide, set up the widget as desired and click the Save button.
   
   
5. Now when you visit a page on your site that, the protected content widget will be displayed. Content in the list is primarily sorted by the day it will become available to the member. If there's a number of pieces of content that become available on the same day then MemberMouse will look at the post published date to determine how to sort it.
   
   Remember that the content you see listed in the protected content widget is based on the access rights of the currently logged in member. If you see the message No content available or No upcoming content, this means that based on the combination of the widget configuration, the access rights of the currently logged in member and the drip content schedules you've created, there is no content to display.
   
   
6. You can control the look and feel of the protected content widget by overriding the default CSS styles. See the Styling a Drip Content Widget section for instructions on how to do this.

Configuration Options

Widget Title	This is the title displayed at the top of the widget. It can be left blank if you don't want a title.
Available or Upcoming Content	Here you specify whether the widget will display currently available content or upcoming content. If you select Show Available Content the widget will display the most recent items that became available to the currently logged in member. If you select Show Upcoming Content the widget will display the next items that will become available to the currently logged in member.
Number of Items to Show	This defines the number of items to display in the widget.
Display Items as Links	This indicates whether the items should be displayed as links or not.
Include Posts	This indicates whether or not you want to include posts in the list of items displayed in the widget. When you include posts you can choose to display all categories or a selected list of categories. If you choose Selected categories you can then select one or more categories from the category list. To select multiple categories use ctrl + click on a PC and command + click on a Mac.
Include Pages	This indicates whether or not you want to include pages in the list of items displayed in the widget.
Include Custom Post Types	This indicates whether or not you want to include custom post types in the list of items displayed in the widget. You can choose which custom post types to include by selecting one or more custom post types from the list. To select multiple custom post types use ctrl + click on a PC and command + click on a Mac.
Show Date Next to Content Title	This indicates whether or not you want to show the date an item became or becomes available after the item title in the widget. If you elect to show the date, you have some additional configuration options: Text to Display – This is where you can define the text that should be displayed along with the date after the item title in the widget. You can include whatever text you want here (HTML is not allowed), just make sure to insert the keyword ##date## in the place where you want the date to appear. Date Format – This is where you specify what format you want the date to be in. You can choose between predefined formats or specify a custom format. Use standard PHP date format rules when defining a custom format.

Styling a Drip Content Widget

We provide a number of CSS styles for you to customize so you can get the protected content widget to look and feel the way you want. Just download this CSS template to see all CSS styles available for customization.