Editorial Circles in PublishPress Permissions

Editorial Circles are a feature in PublishPress Permissions Pro that restrict users to editing posts that were authored by other users in the same group.

PublishPress Permissions also has Visibility Circles. If you are in a Visibility circle for Pages, you will only be able to read pages authored by other circle members.

In most situations, an Editorial Circle is based on a user role.

The most common way to use this feature is to restrict users in the Editor role so that they can only edit posts written by other Editors. This is because Editors are the only default WordPress role that can edit content (except for Administrators).

However, there are some more advanced users we'll address later in this guide.

Restrict Editors to editing posts from other Editors

• Start with the PublishPress Permissions Pro plugin installed on your site.
• Go to “Permissions” in your WordPress admin menu.
• Make sure the “Access Circles” box is checked.

• Go to “Permissions” then “Groups” in your WordPress admin menu.
• Edit the “Editor” group.
• Check the box, “This group is a Editorial Circle”.
• Click “Update Group”.

Next, you can choose to create an Editorial Circle only for some post types:

Once you've completed this set up, all the users in the Editor role will only be able to edit posts that were authored by other members of the same role.

Create More Circles Similar to the Editor Role

In the example above, we only had one Editor role.

In some situations, you may want many roles that act in a similar way. For example:

• A university website has 30+ departments.
• Each department wants to create and edit it’s own pages.

The best way to do this is to duplicate the Editor role.

• Install the PublishPress Capabilities plugin.
• Go to Permissions > Role Capabilities.
• Using the dropdown in the top-left corner, choose Editor.
• Go to the “Copy Editor Role” box.
• Enter the name of a department. For example, enter “History Department”.
• Click “Create”.
• Repeat for other departments.

You can now go back to the “Restrict Editors to editing posts from other Editors” tutorial above and turn these new roles into Editorial Circles.

More Advanced: Editorial Circles for Authors and other roles

It is possible to use Editorial Circles for Authors, Contributors and other roles.

The reason that this approach is labelled “More Advanced” is because these users are not normally allowed to edit posts by other users.

In this example, we will set up Authors as an Editorial Circle for Posts.

• Go to “Permissions” then “Groups” in your WordPress admin menu.
• Edit the “Author” group.
• Under “Post Type” choose “Post”.
• Under “Role” choose “Editor”.
• Check “Standard Statuses”.
• Click “Add Role”.
• Click “Update Group”.

Doing this process will give Authors a promotion to the same level as Editors, but only for Posts.

Now that the Authors have been promoted, we can now restrict them again so that they can only edit Post written by other Authors:

• Check the box, “This group is a Editorial Circle”.
• Click “Update Group”.
• Check only “Post” for “apply limitation for post types”:

Now when users in the Author role are in the WordPress admin area, all posts will be hidden from them unless that content was created by another Author.