Why Limit Authors to Their Own Posts?

By default, your WordPress website will show all posts and pages to all users, regardless of their user role in the admin area. Whether you’re an author, editor, contributor, or administrator, you can view all the articles.

This usually isn’t a problem if the authors are part of your company or team.

However, limiting people to view their own posts is useful in certain situations. For instance, if you run a multi-author website, then it can be useful to keep authors from seeing other writers’ articles in review.

That being said, let’s take a look at how you can limit authors to view their own posts in the WordPress admin.

Limit Authors to Their Own Posts Using a Plugin

Using a WordPress plugin, you can easily allow authors to see only their own posts without editing code.

For this tutorial, we will be using the PublishPress Permissions plugin. It’s a free plugin that lets you manage WordPress permissions, and works out of the box to limit writers to their own articles.

There is also a premium version available in PublishPress Pro bundle, which offers more permission settings like who can access the media library. However, you can start with the free version.

First, you’ll need to install and activate the PublishPress Permissions plugin. For more details, you can follow our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Once the plugin is active, it will automatically show posts to only their authors.

For example, if you’re logged in as the administrator and head over to Posts » All Posts from your dashboard, then you’ll see all the posts.

However, if you log in to the WordPress admin area from an author’s account, then you’ll notice that only the posts created by the author will be visible.

Now, what if you want your editors to be able to access all the posts so they can review them? Let’s see how you can do that.

How to Allow Editors to View All Posts

The problem with using the above method is that it only allows administrators to view all posts.

Many WordPress sites have editors responsible for proofreading articles submitted by other authors and guest contributors. Using this plugin will restrict editors to only their own posts.

However, you can allow editors to review different authors’ content by using a plugin like PublishPress Capabilities plugin or adding code to your site’s theme files. We’ll show you both the methods.

Using PublishPress Capabilities Plugin

PublishPress Capabilities is another plugin created by PublishPress. For the sake of this tutorial, we will be using the free version. There is also a pro version that you can get when you subscribe to a PublishPress Pro account.

First, you’ll need to install and activate the PublishPress Capabilities plugin on your WordPress website. You can follow our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

After the plugin is active, go ahead and click on ‘Capabilities’ in your WordPress admin menu. This will open the ‘Role Capabilities’ page, where you can change permissions for different user roles.

Next, select the user role you want to edit from the dropdown menu in the top left corner.