"Private" Events show Only for Admin Role

[Tom]

I have Events Calendar and Calendar Pro. My goal is to have Events only visible to users who are logged into the site.

Earlier today I and had just swept through turning on my controlled permissions for all pages/posts… and then swept through most Events to change their permission to “Private” from “Public” for all but 1 Event (I wanted to have one that would show no matter what).

When I log into the site as an Admin, all of the Events appear as they should. When I log in as any other role (“Contributor”, “Subscriber”, and “Editor”) those roles see only the 1 remaining “Public” event and none of the “Private” flagged Events.

Based on other posts in your Forum, it appears I should be able to accomplish my goal with only these settings – and shouldn’t have to do any .php work.

Is there some additional step I’m missing?

Tom C.

[Tom]

Oh – and on a potentially related front (or clue) – when I attempt to switch views to either List, Map, or Photo, the browser tab shows “Page Not Found”… yet it renders without content. The page iself has the “unblock” checkbox checked. Again, not sure if they’re related or if this is a clue. – Tom C.

[Barry]

Hi Tom:

Private posts generally are not visible to users who are not editors/administrators:

Private posts are automatically published but not visible to anyone but those with the appropriate permission levels (Editor or Administrator).

So it sounds like it is actually behaving as expected here. The end goal you are trying to achieve here isn’t something that is supported “out of the box”, I’m afraid, so it may be worth exploring member only plugins or something of that nature to implement this.

Does that help?

[Tom]

Barry,
Thanks for the quick reply (as always)…
I had seen several posts around the web about which “roles” were actually open or closed when an Event was flagged “Private”, so thank you for clarifying that it is Admin/Editor only.

Given that answer and your suggestion to look to other 3rd party plugins that control permissions, I have another related question/request. Most of the ‘permission control’ plugins leverage the “Blocked” flag for Posts and Pages. I am using WP-Members (and it uses the “blocked” approach).

When in the WP Admin panel and looking at All Events, there is a column for “Blocked” on that view (but not editable). On the detail page for editing each individual Event, the field isn’t present (as it is with Posts and Pages)… so there is no way to control that flag from the UI.

I presume that when the “Public/Password/Private” option was developed, there was a decision to remove the “Blocked” indicator (since it would further complicate things). However, given your answer, it seems that the use of other 3rd Party plugins will leverage that flag and I can’t get to it.

Any chance you’ll consider returning the “Blocked” flag to be visible for Event editing in a future release or fix?

Tom C.

[Tom]

Barry,

Hopefully you’ll all consider re-adding the “Post Restriction” block on the detail Event Edit page (where the user can choose to “block” or “unblock” the post/page… and hopefully Event).

Until then, I went out and pulled down a free plugin called “Capabilities Manager Enhanced”… which allowed me to go through the other Role levels that couldn’t see “Private” and change their permissions to see the “Private” records by unique types (so I could turn on Events without altering posts or pages).

As a result, I went through all of my Events and flagged them as Private, changed the permissions for my Contributor and Subscriber Roles to see the Events, and left all other Roles “off”… and it worked like a charm.

The Capabilities Manager Enhanced plugin comes with a backup/restore feature… and I strongly encourage anyone who reads this post and uses this tool to take a backup before you do anything else… and keep taking backups so you can recover. The plugin does offer a full “reset to default” button, but that is going back to square-1… so the interim backups would be smart. The UI is very simple and I didn’t have problems, but I can see where having this power can really mess things up.

The difference between this “roles/capabilities” solution I’m using (described above) and the possible future ability to edit the “blocked” indicator on an Event (that I’m requesting as a fix/enhancement to Events) is that the “blocked” feature will tell the visitor/user that they have to log in to see content. The Private flag makes it completely invisible and the visitor/user doesn’t even know it exists.

Again, thanks for all of your help on my issues over the past week. You guys are really quick at responding, do a great job of properly understand and answering the issues. You are a great team!!

Tom C.
(PS – I’m only living this “open” so that you can post a response as to whether the “blocked” fix/enhancement has a chance of making a future release. Feel free to close it after you post that answer).

[Barry]

We’re always happy to help if we can 🙂

With regards to post visibility options, though, this is actually something that WordPress provides and our plugin inherits this (rather than it being something we developed from scratch). In WordPress itself, to the best of my knowledge, there is actually no such concept in terms of post visibility as “blocked”.

I am using WP-Members (and it uses the “blocked” approach).

Right, so perhaps this is something they have introduced (and other related plugins might take a similar approach). With reference to this screenshot from their plugin page on wordpress.org, for example, that looks to be like a custom meta box they have added.

I’m not familiar with that plugin so I’m afraid I can’t say why it doesn’t appear within the event editor, but it might be there is a setting to enable support for custom post types such as events – and the best approach is going to be to seek help from the plugin author if you want to further integrate it with our own plugin.

I hope that helps or at least clarifies things – and since I don’t think there’s too much more we can offer on this one I will go ahead and close this thread, but please don’t hesitate to open new threads as needed if you require support for anything else 🙂

Thanks!

[Author]

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