Add a password-protected directory to a WP site

I had a client ask me today if I could set up a secure directory she could use for uploading via FTP some large files needed by another organization. Normally this is a very easy thing to do in cPanel – she’d done it before, years ago – but she couldn’t get it to work now. There’s been a major change since the last time she did it: their site now runs in WordPress. She’s using WP’s ‘pretty permalinks’ feature, which added a few lines to her site’s htaccess file. Those lines were the culprit I was looking for. It’s a pretty easy thing to work around, but it took a bit of google-fu to find the fix:

Credit for the htaccess tweak goes to this guy.