Searching amember protected site

Photo credit: Pascal Montsma

I love using aMember. One of the things that is attractive to me is that I can use anything to manage my content including plain old HTML. But when you have ran a membership site for as long as 4, going on 5 years those resources and can add up. Unless you’re using a content management system it can be difficult for members to find stuff.

That’s problem #1 but you can’t just slap on any search engine either because the content is protected, many third party search engines cannot access it because they cannot log in. Well, I’ve tried a few different options but ended up using Sphider and it works nicely. One thing you must do after setting Sphider up is to make sure the spider has access by editing the htaccess file and add this.

########### SPHIDER ###########
RewriteCond %{http_user_agent} ^.*Sphider.*
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [L]
########### SPHIDER END ###########

If you changed the user agent inside Sphider admin, you’ll want to change it in this code too.

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8 Comments

  1. Martha on November 26, 2008 at 8:24 pm

    Hi Lynette!

    Thanks for the information and instructions. You’re the best!



  2. Martha on November 26, 2008 at 4:24 pm

    Hi Lynette!

    Thanks for the information and instructions. You’re the best!



  3. Darina on November 27, 2008 at 9:11 am

    How cool are you Lynette ! How do you come up with these things LOL ! thanks



  4. Darina on November 27, 2008 at 5:11 am

    How cool are you Lynette ! How do you come up with these things LOL ! thanks



  5. David on November 27, 2008 at 2:33 pm

    Great idea. Will test it out on my sites.

    David



  6. David on November 27, 2008 at 10:33 am

    Great idea. Will test it out on my sites.

    David



  7. Lynette on December 1, 2008 at 7:15 pm

    Welcome all. Just realized I missed something in the post too. In Sphider, you can change the user agent string. If you use the default, the code above should work. If you change it, you have to change the code above where it says Sphider as well.



  8. Lynette on December 1, 2008 at 3:15 pm

    Welcome all. Just realized I missed something in the post too. In Sphider, you can change the user agent string. If you use the default, the code above should work. If you change it, you have to change the code above where it says Sphider as well.