Web Communication

Managing editorial access for pages on WordPress at WSU

In a default WordPress installation, users with a role of Author, Contributor, or Subscriber have varying levels of access to posts, but do not have access to create or edit pages. Users with a role of Editor or Administrator have full access to both.

At WSU, pages are frequently more useful than posts for managing large amounts of content on a site. We have made a few adjustments to the Author and Contributor roles so that more users have access to pages without having the full set of capabilities associated with the Editor or Administrator roles.

New Pages

Authors and Contributors can create new pages by default, but must submit them for review before they are published. An Editor or Administrator can review the content and then publish when ready. As long as the page has not been published, the creating Author or Contributor can continue to edit the page and resubmit for review.

Editors and Administrators can always create and publish new pages.

Existing Pages

Authors and Contributors are not able to edit existing pages by default, even if they are assigned as the page author.

If the administrator for the site enables the Editorial Access Manager plugin, which is available for all sites on the WSU platform, Authors and Contributors can be assigned as editors for the page by either role or user. Once assigned as an editor for a page, Authors and Contributors are able to edit all parts of the page and publish their changes at will.

If you have any questions about access to pages and posts by any of the user roles, please feel free to stop by open lab on Friday mornings or in the WSU Web Slack team at any time.

Intro to WordPress – August Edition

When: August 17th @ 9:30 am – 11:00 am

Where: ITB 2025

This will be a general introduction training. Anyone who is new to WordPress here at WSU, or who may need a refresher, is welcome to attend.

Intro to WordPress – July Edition

When: July 21st @ 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm

Where: ITB 2025

This will be a general introduction training. Anyone who is new to WordPress here at WSU, or who may need a refresher, is welcome to attend.

WSU Spine 1.4.3 Released

The latest version of the WSU Spine framework has been released as 1.4.3.

As always, if you are using a manual build of the WSU Spine, we recommend updating as soon as possible.

To automatically receive the benefits of bug fixes like this, we recommend using the latest version of the Spine from the centrally hosted repo.wsu.edu server. A full explanation of the hosted repository is in the project’s readme file.

https://repo.wsu.edu/spine/1/spine.min.js

https://repo.wsu.edu/spine/1/spine.min.css

Here’s a recap of the changes from this release.

Enhancements

  • Adjust Spine colors for various themes and nav elements. See #353 for the discussion and #381
  • Allow multiple nav sections to be open at the same time in the Spine. See #367
  • Allow the current nav section to be toggled closed. See #386
  • Several adjustments to test HTML markup to help better describe expected conditions of the Spine.

Bug Fixes

  • Only apply box shadow to #glue on .spine-mobile-open. See #374
  • Remove spine-mobile-open from html on resize to full screen. See #375
  • Apply a max width of 100% to figure. See #382
  • Allow other HTML tags inside anchor elements in the Spine navigation. See #385

If you run into any issues with the Spine or have suggestions, please feel free to open a new issue on the GitHub repository, stop by Open Labs on Friday morning, or bring it up on the WSU Web Slack.

New WordPress Plugin: WSUWP Content Visibility

Management of page visibility has long been on the list of features in progress for WordPress at WSU. Today, the WSUWP Content Visibility plugin is available for activation on your site!

WSUWP Content Visibility is a WordPress plugin used to control the visibility of content for groups of authenticated visitors. The interface for managing the visibility of content is built into the Publish area of a page or post.

Four groups are provided by default:

  • Members of this site include anyone that appears in your site’s list of users. They can be subscribers, authors, editors, or administrators.
  • WSU Network ID (NID) includes anyone that has a valid WSU NID. They do not have to be members of the specific site.
  • WSU Students includes anyone that has a WSU NID and is a student.
  • WSU Employees includes anyone that has a WSU NID and is an employee.

If a non-authenticated user arrives on a page restricted by WSUWP Content Visibility, the user will be redirected to a login screen. If an authenticated user arrives on a page and is not a member of an assigned group, that user will be redirected to the home page.

For more details, check out the plugin documentation. If you have any questions or run into issues, please stop by open lab, join our Slack team, or open an issue on the GitHub repository.

Open Lab in Spokane on May 4

The web team will be making a trip up to Spokane on Wednesday, May 4th for another open labs session. Stop by PBS 118 from 10am to 12pm or SAC 313 from 1:30pm to 3:30pm and join the fun. Bring any web related questions, we’ll bring a thing or two to talk about as well.

See you there!

 

Heads up – previous generation template outage

Just a heads up for everyone –

On Monday, April 18, 2016 there will be a short outage of the previous generation template. All sites that use templates from designer.wsu.edu will be affected. IT will start work on a server starting at 7:30 am, and the outage should only take 10-20 minutes.

This will not affect any site using the current Spine template.