How to Give Elementor Users Access to One Post
The Elementor plugin is an excellent good page-builder for WordPress sites. It is also growing very fast, with huge numbers of new downloads every day.
This week, one PublishPress customer asked us if it was possible to allow some WordPress users to edit a single post with Elementor.
Our first thought was “yes, this is easy”. We've done it before many times using this approach, this approach and others.
However, more testing revealed that a workaround is needed for Elementor. This is because Elementor can only be used if you have the edit posts permission.
The edit_posts permission is very powerful and allows far more access than our customer wanted to give this user. They only wanted to allow access to one post.
Here is a workaround that you can use restrict access to Elementor posts. This tutorial will also work for Pages and custom post types.
Video tutorial
Step #1. Create a new user role
First, we're going to copy the Subscriber role because it has very limited permissions. Click here for more on creating new user roles.
- Install the PublishPress Permissions and PublishPress Capabilities plugins.
- Go to the “Capabilities” link in your WordPress admin menu.
- Choose “Subscriber” in the “Select Role to View / Edit” box.
- Enter “Elementor User” into the “Copy Subscriber Role” box.
- Click “Copy”.
- Under “Type-Specific Capabilities”, check the box saying “Use create_posts capability”.
- Click “Update”.
- In the “Editing Capabilities” area, check the box for “Edit” in the “Posts” row.
- Place a red X in all the other boxes of the “Posts” row.
What are we are doing here is giving the edit_posts permission, but also removing all the other key permissions.
Step #2. Give Access to a Post
- Go to “Posts” in your WordPress admin menu.
- Edit a post.
- Scroll down to the “Permissions: Edit this Post” box.
- Choose “Enabled” for the “Elementor User” role.
Step #3. Create and Test the User
- Go to “Users” in your WordPress admin area.
- Create a user in your new role.
Now it's time to test your new user. You can either login as the new user in different browser, or reply on a plugin such as User Switching.
When you login as your new user, this image shows what you will see. The user will have very limited access, but they will be able to edit the post you gave access to. The PublishPress Permissions plugin is hiding any posts that they can not access.
There's also a version of this guide available for the Beaver Builder plugin, because it presents similar problems.