[Resolved] Allow administrators to read private posts

[Author]

Posts

[BrendanM4226]

I am trying to: control access to certain member listings

Link to a page where the issue can be seen: hidden link

I expected to see: filtered member list (the 'Test Member' should not show when not logged in)

Instead, I got: all members listed

Ticket submitted by Toolset contractor Chuck Gregory on behalf of Brendan Moran

[Christian Cox]

Hi, Access is designed to help you hide content on a post in a restricted post group, but restricted post titles may still appear in search results or View results. Unfortunately there's not a great way to hide restricted posts from View or Archive results right now. The only option is to use inline access_control shortcodes in the Loop Output, but this can be problematic if your View or Archive uses pagination because the conditionals will cause inconsistent counts.

Our developers have a feature request in place that will integrate Access and Views like this, but I don't have a timeline for its delivery. The best place to keep up with new feature releases is our blog: https://toolset.com/blog

[BrendanM4226]

Thank you for your reply. I finally realized that what I was describing could be accomplished by changing the wordpress visibility for the member posts that needed to be protected. By making these private, I not only hid the posts themselves but also removed them from lists.

But...

This had the effect of hiding the posts for everyone. Even admin. I messed with settings in access, even went so far as to enable 'read private posts' and 'read private pages' for everyone except guests. No help.

In a last-ditch effort I decided to deactivate the Toolset Access plugin. And now everything works.

So, I need help figuring out what happened; is this a huge bug or did I do something wrong. I'm leaning toward bug. We do have a working solution on the site but I've checked 'I still need help' because I think this is an issue with the plugin that needs to be resolved.

Thanks, Chuck.

[Christian Cox]

The permissions for reading private posts are specific to the post type. So if your Member post slug is "member" you will have to add a custom capability "read_private_members" in the Change Permissions dialog with Access active.

[BrendanM4226]

That did not work

[Christian Cox]

May I log in to your site to see what's going on? Please provide login credentials in the private reply fields here.

[Christian Cox]

Seems to be working for me. I believe you need to bring the native Posts type under Access control to see the changes applied to custom post types. Here are the steps I took, and a screenshot of the results attached:
- Activate Toolset Access
- Go to Toolset > Access Control > Post Types and bring the native Posts type under Access control. Modify the configurations as needed.
- Go to Toolset > Access Control > Custom Roles and hover over Administrator role. Click "Change permissions", then go to the "Custom capabilities" tab. Add "read_private_members" and save.
- Refresh the Member page on the front-end of the site.

I reverted all of these changes for now.

[BrendanM4226]

Thank you for the detailed instructions. It works.