Blog Archives

How to Manage Jetpack User Capabilities

Written on October 17, 2021.

Jetpack is one of the most popular plugins in WordPress with over 5 million users. The plugin is a swiss-army knife that offers users a ton of helpful features including security, spam-blocking, backups, traffic statistics, and more.

Several PublishPress customers have asked us how to control access to the Jetpack settings. For example, one user wanted to allow their Editors to see the traffic statistics.

In this post, I'll explain several ways that you can control access to the Jetpack dashboard.

5 Ways to Disable the Gutenberg Block Editor

Written on October 16, 2021.

The Gutenberg editor provokes a lot of debate in the WordPress world. Some people love Gutenberg – we're in that camp and built the PublishPress Blocks plugin. Some people really don't like Gutenberg and prefer to stick with the editor they've used for years.

However, most WordPress users have more mixed feelings and prefer to switch back-and-forth depending on the project. We've had several questions from PublishPress customers who want to know how to disable Gutenberg in some situations, or for some users.

In this guide, we share several different ways you can disable Gutenberg. Each option has its own methods for switching between Gutenberg and the older, classic editor.

Revisions 3 Has a New Workflow and is Ready for Testing

Written on October 14, 2021.

PublishPress Revisions is a plugin that allows you to safely make changes to WordPress posts. You can edit a post and submit those changes for feedback and approval, before it goes live on your site. It's also possible to schedule those changes to go live on a future date.

All of these features make PublishPress Revisions a popular choice for WordPress publishers.

However, to see the full potential of PublishPress Revisions, we need to make some big updates to how the plugin works.

How to Create an Inbox for WordPress Authors

Written on October 12, 2021.

This week, we talked with a PublishPress customer who has a busy site with many posts from different authors. They wanted to create an “inbox” effect, where the WordPress “Posts” screen is like a personal email inbox for each author.

In the image below, you can see posts from multiple different authors. This can be confusing for users. Our customer wanted to avoid that situation. They wanted to create an inbox where your authors can only see their own posts.

How to Show Gutenberg Blocks in Elementor

Written on October 12, 2021.

Both the Gutenberg Editor and Elementor are excellent ways to build a WordPress website. We recently checked the numbers and found that these are the two fastest growing options for WordPress sites.

However, in most situations, you need to choose either Gutenberg or Elementor. The two systems are not very compatible with each other.

So we considered it a challenge this week when a PublishPress customer asked us if they could use the PublishPress Blocks plugin inside pages built with Elementor. After some research, we found that this is possible. I'm going to show you how to insert any Gutenberg block into Elementor layouts.

Live Examples of PublishPress Series, Including Post Status

Written on October 7, 2021.

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Launching PublishPress Series

Earlier this year, we adopted the “Organize Series” plugin.

This is a plugin that allows you to group content together into a series. This is ideal for magazines, newspapers, short-story writers, teachers, comic artists, or anyone who writes multiple posts on the same topic.

We renamed the plugin “PublishPress Series” and have been working on a lot of improvements.

One piece of feedback we had from several users was “This plugin looks great, but do you have any live examples so I can see how it's used?”

How to Control Access to Post Expirator

Written on October 5, 2021.

In May 2021, we took over running the Post Expirator plugin.

Post Expirator allows you to choose an expiry date for WordPress posts. When your post is automatically unpublished, you can delete the post, change the status, or update the post categories.

Until now, these features were available to anyone with post editing access. However, it's clear that some sites need the ability to restrict access to Post Expirator. That's now possible in version 2.6.0.

How to Use Nested Blocks in the Gutenberg Editor

Written on September 28, 2021.

Nested blocks are a really useful feature in the Gutenberg editor. If you haven't used them yet, you almost certainly will when the new “Full-Site Editing” changes arrive in WordPress 5.8. At that point, you will be able to build complete webpages in Gutenberg and I guarantee you'll be using nested blocks.

Nested blocks makes it easy to create advanced layouts. This is because nested blocks are blocks inside other blocks. A simple example is a Column block with a text block inside. Another example is a pricing block with a “Buy Now” button block inside.

Some common uses of nested blocks are the default Columns, Cover, or Group blocks.

PublishPress Capabilities Can Hide Metaboxes, and Any Editor Feature

Written on September 8, 2021.

Back in June, we released “Editor Features” in the PublishPress Capabilities plugin. This allowed you to hide almost any feature on the post editing screen.

Why do I say “almost”? Because the first release of Editor Features could not hide metaboxes.

I'm happy to say that you can now use PublishPress Capabilities to hide metaboxes. This means that when users are writing a post, you can hide ANYTHING that you don't want them to see.

Why would you want to hide features from your users? Some people do this so that the post editing screen is cleaner and less confusing. Other people do this for security and to prevent users from changing some key settings.

The PublishPress Series Plugin is Available

Written on September 2, 2021.

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Launching PublishPress Series

Last month, we adopted the “Organize Series” plugin.

We're pleased to say we've renamed the plugin “PublishPress Series” and have released a new version of the plugin with many bug-fixes and improvements.

PublishPress Series is a plugin that allows you to group content together into a series. This is ideal for magazines, newspapers, short-story writers, teachers, comic artists, or anyone who writes multiple posts on the same topic.

The plugin aligns perfectly with our goal at PublishPress, which is to help WordPress publishers succeed.

PublishPress Series Free is available on WordPress.org.
PublishPress Series Pro is available here for PublishPress members.

The plugin now has its own penguin banner on the WordPress plugin repository:

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