With the latest version of Coaster CMS you can now block visitors from accessing certain content such as PDFs, images and documents unless they are logged in. Users who try to access any of this content before they are logged in, will be redirected to a login page where if they don’t already have an account can choose to register accordingly. Once logged in, all of these files will become available to the user.

I have been building websites for 10 years or so and for most of that time been doing so professionally and I’ve seen many different CMS systems and built a few myself. Very often they felt like they’d been built by developers for other developers to use (which was great in some ways) but the most systems tended to get a bit bloated and difficult to understand. This lead me to believe that there was a better solution that could be built.

We recently required the use of canonicals on a client’s site. This meant that we had to come up with an easy solution for us to be able to assign individual canonical URLs on a page by page basis. As our client’s site was using Coaster CMS the solution was rather simple, and as there are likely to be other users of Coaster CMS out there, who may require the same functionality, we thought we’d write a blog about it.