How to Stop WordPress Users from Updating Published Content
One PublishPress user asked if it was possible to stop users from publishing changes to existing WordPress posts and pages.
Yes, it's possible with a plugin called PublishPress Revisions. I'm going to give you an overview of how to set this up on your site.
To get started, download and install the PublishPress Revisions plugin.
PublishPress Revisions will create a role called “Revisor”. You can see that new role in the “Users” screen in WordPress.
When a Revisor logs into WordPress and edits a post, all they will see is the “Submit Revision” button, as in the image below. They will not see an “update” button.
When the user clicks this button, they'll see this message: “Your modification has been saved for editorial review.”
This revision will be sent to the “Revision Queue” feature in PublishPress Revisions:
The Revisor can keep on submitting new revisions but they will never be able to publish them. They will have to wait for a higher level user to login and publish the revision.
More on revision permissions
The Revisor role in PublishPress Revisions is provided to make it easy for you. However, PublishPress Revisions does provide for more flexible solution. Revisonary relies on two key permissions in WordPress.
Although the names of those permissions refer to “edit”, they actually control publishing permissions. These permissions can be edited using a plugin such as PublishPress Capabilities.
After installing PublishPress Capabilities, go to “Capabilities”. In the right sidebar, you can choose the role you want to edit. Then look in the center of the screen for the “Edit published” row. This allows you to control who can edit revisions.
Other restrictions you can apply to users include allowing them to update but not create content, stopping them from adding new tags, and preventing them from seeing other users' posts.
Get full PublishPress access
The Pro version of PublishPress Revisions is packed with extra features to help you manage your content updates. Get a PublishPress membership today for full access to PublishPress Revisions Pro.
Great Article, thanks Steve.
Thanks Stephen. There’s lots more to come with Revisionary over the next few weeks.
Steve,
Is there a way to prevent users from editing posts or content with other statuses besides “published”? For instance, I would like to have my users change the status to “Pending Review” and not be able to make changes at that point. My editor can then go in and make changes without the users being able to reverse any changes prior to being published.
Hi Bill. Not yet, but that’s coming. It’s a feature that’s available with the plugins we acquired last week: https://publishpress.com/blog/presspermit/