3 Ways to Improve Folders Plug-in Efficiency with User Access Restrictions

The Folders plug-in for WordPress now boasts an improved user access restriction functionality for the plug-in settings. Via a user-friendly dashboard, website owners and admin users can restrict the level of access and manageability to specific WordPress user roles or users in order to control what permissions related to the Folders plug-in are given to certain user roles and users. Please note this feature is available in our paid plans only!

Once the feature is enabled, you will see the existing WordPress user roles in your WordPress website with their corresponding default permissions.

The permissions you can choose from are “admin” (this will grant full access to modifying, creating and viewing folders), “view and edit” (this will allow the qualifying users to be able to update and view currently existing folders only), “view only” (to only view existing folders without the ability to modify them in any way) and “no access” (to not see anything related to Folders). 

Please also note that these permission-related settings only work for the Folders plug-in and do not affect the user role permissions or access to other parts of your website.

Apart from setting up the same setting for all users of a specific user role, you can also change the permissions for individual users in a way that won’t affect other users under the same role. 

This feature is of great help for businesses with growing websites that have a lot of users on the website, including, but not limited to, educational institutes, blogs, e-commerce websites or any other business with a set of users responsible for managing different areas of the website. To learn more about how this functionality works, please check our helpdesk article here.

Let’s explore some example use cases in more detail below, and see how easy it is to enhance manageability over accessibility.

#1. Multi-author blogs

If you run a blog or a news website, you likely have multiple authors, permanent or guest, contributing to your website. Therefore, you may want to restrict certain user roles – such as authors – from being able to perform certain actions related to organising items in folders. 

For example, an admin may prefer third-parties not to be able to set up their own folders, so they can provide Author role users with a “view only” permission that will allow them to see folders and their content, but not delete the folder or create news one. This can be useful if you wish to ensure nothing is modified from a non-admin user. 

Additionally, you can benefit from the already existing Folders “user restrictions” functionality in order to make it possible for individual users to only have access to their own folders in order to – for example, upload new media into that folder or manage and use existing media. You can also do the same for posts created or managed by an author.

#2. Universities and other educational institutions

In our experience, educational institutions often use the Folders plug-in to manage multiple components of their website and organise it for different user groups, from articles or course materials of teachers to student records and other sensitive information.

For example, a teacher may have created different folders for a course content, but would like to hide them from a student who hasn’t reached that course level yet. They can select this specific user – without affecting other users of the same role – and set them to the “no access” setting option.

А senior teacher may be given access to “view and edit” folders in order to prepare relevant grouped files for students.

#3. Businesses of any kind that want to give restricted access to employees or clients

Regardless of your business nature, you may want stricter employee access control to your website, the Folders settings included.

Users from a managing team may be provided with full “admin”-like access to manage Folders settings, including the ability to create, delete, copy, paste, rename, lock, move and delete folders. Staff can be given more limited rights.

Imagine you have an online shop and for better organisation purposes you place orders in different folders based on the order status. If you have staff, such as a store manager WordPress user role, you may allow their user role to “view and edit” folders, so that they can move around the orders between the existing folders, but not be able to make any further changes on the folder tree.

Overall, the Folders plugin for WordPress is a powerful tool for websites of all kinds to organise and get around their website content more easily. One of the newest additions to the plug-in is the ability to restrict the actions that can be performed in relation to the Folders settings for different user roles or individual users. Whether you have multiple authors contributing to your blog, different teams responsible for managing various sections of your website, or offer courses, you can now ensure each user can perform only the actions they’re qualified for by an admin. Feel free to give this feature a try!