How To Hide the Edit Link For WordPress Posts

We had an interesting question from a PublishPress customer this week. They wanted to hide the “Edit” link on published WordPress posts.

This customer wanted to make sure his users clicked the “New Revision” link instead of editing the post directly. This “New Revisions” link is coming from the PublishPress Revisions plugin, which gives you a safe space for working on content updates. Removing the “Edit” link will prevent the users from making unapproved changes to published content.

This screenshot below shows the “Edit” and “New Revision” links:

Using PublishPress Revisions, users can update posts using the normal WordPress editor, but their changes will not be published automatically. Instead, the changes are stored as a “pending revision” that can be approved, rejected or scheduled.

So the task is to force users to click the “New Revision” button instead of the default “Edit” link. Thanks to the PublishPress Capabilities plugin, this is possible.

• Go to the “Capabilities” menu in PublishPress Capabilities.
• Select the role which you want to edit.
• Uncheck on “Edit others” and “Edit published” on the post type, as in this screenshot below:

This screenshot below shows what users will see after you revoke the “Edit others” and “Edit published” capabilities. The users can click “New Revision” but do not have the “Edit” option.

I should add a couple of notes to this tutorial:

• Users will still be able to edit content that has not yet been published.
• There are more ways to hide the “Edit” button. The solution in this guide is simply the best approach to use with the “PublishPress Revisions” button.