PublishPress Capabilities Can Hide Metaboxes, and Any Editor Feature

Written by Steve Burge on September 8, 2021.

Back in June, we released “Editor Features” in the PublishPress Capabilities plugin. This allowed you to hide almost any feature on the post editing screen.

Why do I say “almost”? Because the first release of Editor Features could not hide metaboxes.

I'm happy to say that you can now use PublishPress Capabilities to hide metaboxes. This means that when users are writing a post, you can hide ANYTHING that you don't want them to see.

Why would you want to hide features from your users? Some people do this so that the post editing screen is cleaner and less confusing. Other people do this for security and to prevent users from changing some key settings.

What are Metaboxes?

“Metaboxes” is a strange name, but you have seen them often if you use WordPress.

When a user edits a post, the edit screen has several default boxes: “Status & visibility”, “Featured image”, “Categories”, “Tags”, etc. These boxes are metaboxes. Plugins can also add their own metaboxes.

The Pro version of the PublishPress Capabilities plugin now allows you to hide metaboxes for specific user roles.

In this image below, you can see ten metaboxes. They often take up most of the space in the post editing screen. With PublishPress Capabilities, you can hide any of these boxes. This will work with Gutenberg, Classic Editor, and any pagebuilder that shows metaboxes.

How to Hide Metaboxes

For these examples, we're starting with the PublishPress Capabilities Pro plugin installed.

In the image below, you can see two metaboxes:

“Yoast SEO” from the Yoast SEO plugin.
“Editorial Comments” from the PublishPress plugin.

To hide these metaboxes, follow these steps:

Go to “PublishPress”, then “Editor Features” in your WordPress admin menu.
Choose the user role you want to hide the metaboxes for. This image below includes the five default WordPress user roles, plus also two Yoast SEO user roles.

Scroll down to the bottom of the screen and find the “Metaboxes” area.
If you don't see all your metaboxes, go to edit a post. Then reload this “Editor Features” screen.

Place a red X for any metabox you want to hide. In the image below, we are hiding both the “Yoast SEO” and “Editorial Comments” metaboxes.

Click “Save Changes”.
Visit the post editing screen as a user in the role you selected. You will no longer see the metaboxes you selected.

How to Hide Any Element

This is another approach that's available in PublishPress Capabilities Pro. You can hide any element by specifying the ID or class. In this example, we'll hide the same two Yoast SEO and Editorial Comments metaboxes. However, you really could hide anything on the WordPress post editing screen.

To hide a metabox, find the ID of this element. In this example, I'm using the “Inspector” tool in my browser. This image below shows that the ID is wpseo_meta.