Menu item & content restrictions no longer work

Hallo Rene,
Sinds de laatste update heb ik gemerkt dat de Ultimate Member Menu Settings bij mij niet automatisch is toegevoegd wanneer ik een nieuw menu item toevoeg. Heb jij inmiddels een oplossing kunnen achterhalen? Bij de bestaande pagina’s zijn deze nog wel in te stellen.
Met vriendelijke groet, Peter

Beste Peter, dat kwam ik ook tegen. Gelukkig is daar een workaround voor: na toevoegen van een nieuw menu-item moet je het menu opslaan, en daarna het menu-item bewerken. Je ziet dan weer de opties om de toegang te beperken. Succes, René

• This reply was modified 5 years, 11 months ago by renevlak.

P.S. I have done some testing with an older version of UM (2.0.29). The menu issues do not seem to happen in that version, but several other issues also occur in 2.0.29 (incomplete UM member lists, restricted taxonomies that do not work properly anymore, etc.). I will update my findings here over the next few days.

Thank you so much Rene. I followed your workaround and happed to work ?? Thanks again!

Here’s an update on my initial posting. I have done a lot of debugging / testing over the past days, and I have a much clearer picture now of what exactly is going wrong:

1) The irregular behaviour of restricted menu items appears to be caused by a conflict with the WP User Frontend plugin (which is a 3rd party plugin that is recommended by UM for its ability to create forms, e.g. for front end content submission). Like UM, the WPUF plugin also includes functionality to restrict menu items. I have disabled that funtionality and the menu restrictions set by UM are now working fine again. The only thing that is still not fully functioning is that for new menu items, one has to first save the menu before the UM restriction options appear. This used to work better in the past.

2) Member lists (directories) generated by UM are only correctly shown to Administrators and Editors. Anybody with a (custom) role with fewer capabilities gets to see incomplete member lists. I have not noticed this issue before, despite extensive testing during development over the past few months. It really is a mystery to me what is causing this.

3) UM restricted taxonomies no longer work. For ease of use, I mimicked the way in which the Groups plugin allows for content restriction (ie. a Group taxonomy with simple checkboxes in the backend). This is easier to understand for editors, takes less clicking than the default UM restriction settings, and allows for easy bulk editing of content restrictions from the backend. To make this possible, I added a custom taxonomy called ‘Groepen’ with terms that are restricted on roles by UM. In other words, if ‘Groep’ A is selected on a (custom) post or page, thanks to UM this content can only be accessed by users with role A. This alternative way of restricting access used to work fine until recently, but now restricted content is no longer showing up in overviews and archives for users with role A, and similarly restricted pages are showing a ‘You have no access to this content’ message. This is really problematic, because the only workaround I have found, is to go through 500+ content items one by one and setting the UM restrictions in the regular way (ie via the meta box below the post content). I really hope this can be resolved!

Can you post the workaround, since the support of ultimatemember does not solve it, please?

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Hi @renevlak,

We are aware that some users may experience issues with menu restriction settings and we’ve fixed this issue in our latest version which will be released very soon.
Thanks for your patience.

Regards.

Hi @ultimatemembersupport, that’s good to hear. I will post the other two issues in the premium support section, now that support is back online. Happy new year!

Here’s a final update, after lots of further testing and in-depth contact with UM support:

ad 1) The irregular behaviour of restricted menu items can be resolved by disabling or removing the WP User Frontend plugin, or by installing the WPFront User Role Editor plugin. The latter has a setting which allows you to disable menu item restrictions by WPUF.

ad 2) The incomplete member directories were caused by imported users. The missing users were all imported into WordPress with Ultimate CSV importer, and apparently imported users are only shown to admins by UM until they are ‘Reactivated’. You can do this from the Users overview in the backend > select relevant users > click on UM Action dropdown > select Reactivate). I have asked UM support to include this in their documentation, in case other people use an importer to bulk create new users.

ad 3) If UM restricted taxonomies do not work properly, the cause may be the ‘Hide from queries’ setting that can be activated on a taxonomy term (um_content_restriction__um_access_hide_from_queries). If multiple taxonomy terms apply to a given content item, and each term has different role restrictions with ‘Hide from queries’ ticked, a user that does not have each applicable role, is not able to see that item.

For example, if a post has taxonomy terms ‘Group A’, ‘Group B’ and ‘Group C’, and access to ‘Group A’ is restricted to ‘Role 1’, ‘Group B’ is restricted to ‘Role 2’ and ‘Group C’ is restricted to ‘Role 3’, a user with just Role 3 can not see the item.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to simply untick ‘Hide from queries’ for each taxonomy term, because in that case, user with Role 3 will also see posts that should not be accessible by him/her. That is, in search queries, archives and single posts only the main contents is hidden, while the title and featured image of a restricted post are still visible.

To resolve this issue, I have asked UM whether it would be possible to adjust the ‘Hide from queries’ parameter, so that it checks whether a user has ANY role that may view / access the contents, rather than ALL roles. They indicated that this is beyond the scope of their support, as they already offer a’native’ way of restricting access rights (which works well). So my conclusion is that if you have multiple groups / roles that should have fine grained access rights, you should stick to the ‘native’ UM way of restricting access (even though that does not (yet) allow for bulk editing), or find some other tool that does the job as well across all (custom) post types. Do not use taxonomy terms with role restrictions set by UM for that.