Visibility Circles in PublishPress Permissions

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

PublishPress Permissions also has Editorial Circles. If you are in an Editorial Circle for Pages, you will only be able to edit pages authored by other circle members.

In most situations, an Visibility Circle is based on a user role. So in this tutorial, we'll show you how to turn a user role into a Visibility Circle.

Example: Restricting Authors to reading posts from other Authors

• 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 “Author” group.
• Check the box, “This group is a Visibility Circle”.
• Click “Update Group”.

Next, you can choose to create Visibility Circles only for some post types.

• Choose “Post”.
• Click “Update Group”.

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

Create More Circles Similar to the Author Role

In the example above, we only had one Author 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 read only it’s own pages.

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

• Install the PublishPress Capabilities plugin.
• Go to Permissions > Role Capabilities.
• In the “Select Role to View/Edit” box, choose Author.
• Click Load.

• Go to the “Copy Author 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 “Restricting Authors to viewing posts from other Authors” tutorial above and turn these new roles into Visibility Circles.