I suppose “ease” is a matter of perspective. Professional, custom solutions are necessary to do anything that a Theme or Plugin hasn’t canned. By the very nature of “custom” considerations, this is antithetical to what a theme or plugin provides.
You can hear my rhetoric about the ills of over-specialization, and my equally boring diatribes about systems architecture and good theme construction (elegantthemes) vs. bad (woothemes). Note that WP does not endorse my broad sweeping statements… I’m a custom coder seeking performance, and customization: ET stays out of my way while offering great theme support. Woo is more… impossible… unless one is a hands on pro blogger who doesn’t want or have dev support. They do ok in that case.
Then there is good membership. You may not take advantage of the goodness however, if you are not willing to customize, which means PHP and/or javascript coding. So no, it isn’t an out-of-box experience.
The custom solution looks like this: http://betterwomensnetwork.com/ where the menu bar displays different content depending on whether a user is logged in or not. If NOT logged in you see the slogan where the navigation normally belongs (“Our first goal is to successfully train…”), but if logged in the page template displays the top Nav Menu for the 5 part, 40 page lesson plan involving lead generation techniques. Since the point of the site is to offer a free membership level with training, it doesn’t make sense to offer the Training Menu publicly.
So there’s the conditional statement set up. If a user is logged in, show the Menu. If not, show the slogan. Simple?
if(!is_user_logged_in()){
<div>Slogan</div>
} else {
//Theme code which shows the Primary Nav Menu
}
That’s how I handled it after locating the Theme’s call to the menu.
I encapsulated the existing code with my conditional response.
There are a million ways to skin the cat here, all of them involve custom code. As little as 2 lines to display a menu conditionally, but this is not rocket science. It just depends on what you need in the end. Your stated need appears very very simple.
I am not selling my services, but really making a point about what it really takes when “Custom” thinking is involved. It takes custom coding. Making the association with a qualified (and hopefully brilliant or at least thoroughly knowledgeable-) WP coder may help you go farther.
