If you are running a multi-author blog or website where several authors are trying to push out content, it is only natural to assign certain categories to certain authors. This helps you, as an administrator or editor, to better manage the website and the authors to focus their efforts on that specific category. If you are in need of limiting authors to post only in a few assigned categories in WordPress, here is how to set that up.
Restrict Categories Using Author Category Plugin
To restrict authors to selected categories, we are going to use a free plugin called Author Category. To start, open your WordPress admin dashboard, navigate to “Plugins -> Add New,” Search for the Author Category plugin and install it.
Once you are done installing the plugin, go ahead and activate it by clicking on the link “Activate Plugin.”
After activating the plugin, you can easily restrict users to a specific category from their respective profile page. To do that, navigate to “Users” and then “All Users.”
Here, find the author you want to restrict, and click on the link “Edit” to open the respective user’s profile page.
In the profile page scroll down to the bottom of the page, and you will see a new section called Author Category. Here, select the category or all the categories (Ctrl + Click) you want the author to be restricted to, and click on the “Update User” button to save the changes. In my case I’ve selected two different categories for the author to be restricted to.
From this point forward whenever the author tries to edit or create a new post, he/she will be limited to the categories you explicitly selected.
As you can see from the above image, if you’ve selected multiple categories for a specific author, the plugin checks all the selected categories by default while the author is creating a new post. If you don’t like this behavior, you can easily change that by navigating to “Users” and then “Author Category.”
Once you are on this page, select the “Check none by default” checkbox.
Restrict Categories Using Restrict Author Posting Plugin
Alternatively, you can also use the other plugin called Restrict Author Posting to achieve the same thing as above. The advantage of this plugin is that it doesn’t have an extra settings page, and it even lets you restrict authors so that they can only use the media they have uploaded.
You can install the plugin just like I described above. Once installed, activate the plugin to start using it.
Just like the above plugin, you can restrict authors to certain categories directly from their profile page. Open the respective author’s profile page from the “All Users” page.
Here, scroll down and you will see a new section where you can restrict authors. Simply select all the categories you want to restrict the author to using the drop-down menu.
If you also want to limit the author to only using his/her media, then select the checkbox “Restrict using his/her own files in media.”
Once you are done with everything, click on the “Update User” button. From this point forward, the author can only post to the categories that you selected.
Do comment below sharing your thoughts and experiences about using the above plugins to restrict authors to specific categories to better manage your blog or website.
Image Credit: wptavern
Vamsi is a tech and WordPress geek who enjoys writing how-to guides and messing with his computer and software in general. When not writing for MTE, he writes for he shares tips, tricks, and lifehacks on his own blog Stugon.
Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox
