The “Contributor” role is one of the default user roles in WordPress, alongside “Subscriber”, “Author”, “Editor” and “Administrator”.
Contributors are close to the bottom of the permissions ladder in WordPress. They have very few permissions. This role is designed to allow people to write content for your site, but they do not have permission to publish without approval.
Here’s a rundown of what Contributors can do on a default WordPress site:
We had an interesting question from a PublishPress user this week:
I am trying to allow a some user role to choose an existing Tag, but not allow them to create new Tags. This was simple enough to do with Categories, but I cannot figure it out for Tags.
This was a great question that requires some explanation. We recommend the TaxoPress plugin for managing your tags, but PublishPress plugins can handle these more complex permissions.
Many of us spend a lot of time working on our content. We spend hours making sure the spelling, grammar, punctuation are as good as possible.
So we are worried about losing content. What happens if my browser crashes? What happens if someone edits my post and makes a mistake?
Fortunately, WordPress has the solution: Revisions.
“Private” is one of eight post statuses available in WordPress. These statuses control whether WordPress posts are visible to the entire world, waiting for moderation, or sent to the trash to await deletion.
When you write in WordPress, you will most commonly see the Draft, Pending Review and Publish statuses.
The Private status is used less frequently, but it can be useful in some situations. Private posts are for content that you only want high-level users to see. These posts are most useful for internal communication and documentation. I would not recommend storing top-secret information in these posts, but rather want to hide content from regular users.
This week, one PublishPress user asked us about an interesting WordPress problem.
They could not see the Author option when they were writing posts. This is how the Author dropdown normally appears:
Many requests from PublishPress revolve around published posts.
Some site owners want to stop their users from updating published content.
Other site owners want to go further and stop their users from editing published content at all. This is because their content often needs an approval process. And what's the point of an approval process if people can go in later and make any changes they want?
It is possible to control access to certain Gutenberg blocks for some users or WordPress roles.
This is possible thanks to the PublishPress Blocks plugin and its Block Access system.
Keep reading to learn how to use this useful PublishPress Blocks feature.
By default, WordPress does not allow you to see a list of your own “Pending Review” posts.
If you're not quite sure what “Pending Review” means in WordPress, read this guide to Pending Review vs Draft.
The inability to easily see the post you've submitted for review can be frustrating.
The image below shows the filters on top of the “Posts” screen in WordPress. As you can see, there are a lot of available filters. However, you can't use more than one of the top row of filters. You can either click “Mine” or you can click “Pending Review” … you can't choose both at the same time.