We recently purchased the plugin and do not have enough time to give a 5-star review. But, so far it's working perfectly!
We have a membership-based organization (no web logins), and we needed a protected area where we could post private information. Password-protecting each page/post was not an easy option. What we wanted was to protect an entire category and all posts within that category. Password Protected Plugin does exactly that. Not only is the category list page protected but each post page is protected as well.
The only thing we have to remember - and this is our responsibility, not the plugin - is to password protect any linked PDFs.
There was a bit of a problem with the installation but the support team quickly responded and resolved the issue within a day. Once installed, setup was very quick and super simple.
We definitely recommend this plugin!
I'm the webmaster for a financial services company who needed an in-house private section of their website to post training videos. I actually wasn't sure how to do this and didn't want to obligate each employee to create their own wordpress user-account, etc. In my plugin search, I tried several and nothing seemed to work. Then I found yours and thought a "category" method of defining the password-protected area was very clever. I decided to buy it and install it and BAM... it just WORKS! Easy. The client is super happy because they were pulling their hair out and I look like the hero. Thank you.
The plugin installs seemlessly into the WordPress framework with no additional coding or tinkering around required.
A particular feature of this plugin that I appreciate is the ability to be able to issue a password unique to each member. This means that removing a member's access is simply a case of removing their password.
Another great feature that this plugin supports is the ability to create a landing page on which a menu of the private contents can remain on display to everyone. When anyone clicks a link, they are then required to log in to view the contents.
Due to an error I had with my WP setup I had reason to contact Barn2 support. A response was recieved back very quickly, so the support is very professional.
So if you need a quick and convenient plugin for protecting particular categories, this one fits the bill.