Multisite Development

How To Limit The WordPress Posts Screen To Only Show Authors Their Own Posts

by 6 Responses

When working on a multi-author WordPress blog, the post listing screen can get a little bit crowded. Sometimes you have to hunt through many posts that are not your own before locating a draft you’ve been working on.

Make it easy for authors to find their own posts
Here’s a quick way that you can change the posts page to show only the author’s own posts. I found this handy tip over at WP Snippets and have updated it and made into a little plugin.

Essentially, the code below checks to see if a user has admin capabilities. If the user is not an admin, he will only see his own posts listed on the posts edit screen, making it easier for him to locate his own posts. The total number of posts published, drafts and pending posts will remain the same, despite the user only being able to see his own.

Simplify Post Edit List Plugin

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<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Simplify Post Edit List
Description: Show only the author's posts in the edit list
Version: 0.1
License: GPL
Author: Sarah Gooding
Author URI: http://untame.net
*/

function mypo_parse_query_useronly( $wp_query ) {
    if ( strpos( $_SERVER[ 'REQUEST_URI' ], '/wp-admin/edit.php' ) !== false ) {
        if ( !current_user_can( 'update_core' ) ) {
            global $current_user;
            $wp_query->set( 'author', $current_user->id );
        }
    }
}

add_filter('parse_query', 'mypo_parse_query_useronly' );

?>

Open a blank text file. Add the code above to it and save it as a php file. Name it anything you want. Then upload the file to your /wp-content/plugins directory. You can now activate the plugin in your WordPress dashboard.

Log in as a user other than admin. Any user who hasn’t written any posts won’t be able to see any in the list.

Non-admin user cannot see any posts listed

This little plugin is very useful if you want to keep multiple authors’ posts private from each other while they are still in draft stage or if you just want to clean up the posts screen to keep things simple in the dashboard.

photo credit: alles-schlumpf via photopin cc

Comments (6)

  1. This is great Sarah, and I just tested it, and it works as advertised.

    My question is why would anyone need this plugin? WordPress already has this filtering feature for the its Authors and Contributors, and you don’t want the posts screen for the Editors to be filtered, so they can edit other people’s posts – that’s what Editors supposed to do. Am I missing something here?

    I regularly enjoy your posts btw…

    • There are many reasons to have this type of filtering. Take BuddyPress for example, many users want blog posting for BP members and this code example can allow members to post blogs and not see other users posts.

  5. Thanks, it works great.

    (1) Is it possible to show ‘count’ of posts of author’s own posts.

    (2) Is it possible to show ‘Comments’ that are received to author’s own posts, instead of all comments?

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