Configure Who Can See Other People’s Posts

In another tutorial, we showed that you can hide other users posts in the WordPress admin area. That tutorial covers all the users on your site.

In this guide, we'll show you how to selectively allow some users to see other people's posts.

One thing to note: If the user has the “edit” equivalent of any of those capabilities, that “list” capability is not required. So the Administrator will always be able to see other users' content because they have the edit_posts and edit_pages capabilities. This guide is normally only required for users with restricted permissions on your site.

Example with the Contributor role

In this guide, we'll use the Contributor role. If you have PublishPress Permissions Pro installed, a Contributor will only be able to see the posts they have written, as in this image below:

• Install the PublishPress Capabilities plugin.
• Click “Capabilities” in your WordPress admin menu.
• Choose the “Contributor” role and click “Load”.

In the right sidebar, you can add more permissions. We are going to add these two:

list_others_posts
list_published_posts

In the example below, I'm adding the list_others_posts permission:

You can check this box in the front of the screen.

Now when a Contributor goes to the “Posts” screen, they will be able to see posts from all users.

You can expand these permissions in multiple ways. In the following sections of this guide, I'll give you some examples.

Control Who Can See Pages

In the example above, we control who can see posts. With these permissions below, you can controll who can view pages:

list_others_pages
list_published_pages

Control Who Can See Custom Post Types

You can set up similar permissions for any post type. For example, this would cover a post type called “Events”.

list_events
list_others_events

This next example is from WooCommerce. With these permission, you can control who is able to see WooCommerce products created by other users:

list_products
list_others_products

Control Who Can See Posts in Specific Statuses

These permissions can also covers posts in certain statuses. This would allow users to see posts in the “Pending” status.

list_for_review_posts
list_pending_posts

This allows users to see WooCommerce products in the “Draft” status.

list_products
list_draft_products