Page 124 - PAM - PROOF

V 1.1 February 2024

Password Protection
Websites are public and not the place to publish or even store sensitive personal
or u3a information but perhaps there are times when you want to give members
access to information or media that you don’t want the world at large to see.
This could be an area for committee documents, more personal items for
members, or group leader data for instance.

Password protect a page
To password protect an individual page you need to navigate to the page you
want to protect. Using your training demo site go to All Pages and select the
Quick Edit option on the Privacy Policy page.

You saw this earlier. Towards the bottom of the form you can see Password or
Private where the red oval is. If you wish to password protect this page then you
(or the author) puts a password in the box and this has to be entered in future
whenever someone tries to access the page. The other option is to check the
Private box if you don’t want anyone to see the page at all. You have a page like
this in the training demo site that you are currently using. It is a Maintenance
Page for use by Admin.

Password protecting a page in this way is only a deterrent. A determined hacker
would no doubt be able to access the page. The security of the information also
depends on where it is stored.

One scenario could be to upload documents into the Media Library and then
provide links to them on your password protected page. In this case the
documents are not protected as anyone with editing rights has access to the
library. This rather defeats the objective of password protecting the page.

Another scenario is to store the documents on an external server and provide
links to them on your password protected page. In this case the person
accessing the document would need to know the password for the page. This is
more secure than the Media Library.

Another scenario is to store the documents on an external server and password
protect each of them individually before providing links to them on either a
password protected page or a non-protected page. On a protected page the
person accessing them would have to know the password to access the page
and then the passwords to each of the documents. This is the most secure way

Workbook for Web Managers Migrating to u3a SiteWorks Page 124