by podpirate 4.5 (17 reviews)

Access Areas for WordPress

Name: Access Areas for WordPress
Rating: 4.5 (17 reviews)
Author: podpirate

Fine tuning access to your posts.

Access Areas for WordPress ranks #9,949 among WordPress.org plugins with 400+ active installations, is #242 of 1,142 in the Editor & Writing category, a 4.5/5 rating from 17 reviews, and was last updated Dec 5, 2025. Data from WordPress.org, refreshed twice daily — see methodology.

Tested up to WP 6.9 (Current: 7.1)

v1.5.22 Current Version v1.5.22

Updated 9 months ago Last Update on 05 Dec, 2025

Refreshed 15 hours ago Last Refreshed on

#242 of 1,142 in Editor & Writing Top 25% by installs

View on WordPress.org

Rank

#9,949

— No change

Active Installs

400+

-7.4%

KW Avg Position

98.7

1 worse

Downloads

32.2K

+2 today

Support Resolved

— No change

Rating

90%

Review 4.5 out of 5

4.5 (17 reviews)

Next Milestone 500

Total Progress 32%

400+ 500+

715

Ranks to Climb

Growth Needed

8,000,000

Active Installs

Pro

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Need 68 more installs to reach 500+

Rank Changes

Current #9,949

Change

Best #

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Active Installs Growth

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Active Installs 0,000,000+

Growth +0.0%

Peak 0,000,000

Downloads Growth

Downloads

Growth

Peak

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Reviews & Ratings

4.5

17 reviews

Overall 90%

14 (82%)

1 (6%)

0 (0%)

2 (12%)

Security History

Source: WPVulnerability

1 known vulnerability on record · 1 in the last 24 months · checked 1 month ago

Apr 1, 2025

Access Areas for WordPress [wp-access-areas] < 1.5.20

CVE-2025-30913 · Fixed in v1.5.20

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Plugin Details

Version: 1.5.22
Last Updated: Dec 05, 2025
Requires WP: 4.6+
Tested Up To: 6.9
PHP Version: 5.6 or higher
Author: podpirate

Support & Rating

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 4.5
Reviews: 17
Support Threads: 0
Resolved: 0%

Keywords

access capability role security user

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TL;DR

AI summary of the plugin's readme

This plugin is for WordPress site owners and multisite network administrators who need to control who can read, edit, or comment on blog posts. It solves the problem of restricting post access by logged-in status, WordPress role, or custom-defined access areas, including bulk editing and network-wide settings.

Custom Access Areas for users
Restrict reading permission
Restrict editing permission
Restrict commenting permission
Global access areas on network
Bulk editing support
German, Italian, Polish, Swedish localization

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about Access Areas for WordPress

Because the plugin can only protect posts, which are database entries. A media also contains a file stored on your servers file system. A file is normally just returned by the server, the WordPress core is not involved. In order to protect a file, let's say an image, the Image URL would have to be point to a special Script, that decides whether the file is protected or not, and if so, which user or group of users would be granted access. A lot of processing would be going on, and each and every little thumbnail would add another one or two seconds to your page load time. The result: Tears, rage and support requests.

For each Post it stores a capabilty the user needs to have in order to view, edit or comment on a post. By defining an Access Area you create nothing more than a custom capability.

I did this mainly for performance reason. For detecting the reading-permission on specific content, the plugin mainly affects the WHERE clause used to retrieve posts. In most cases, using post_meta would mean to add lots of JOIN clauses to the database query, slowing down your site's performance.

It makes changes to your database, but it won't make a mess out of it. Upon install it does two things: 1. It creates a table named ´{$wp_prefix}_disclosure_userlabels´. The access areas you define are here. 2. It adds three columns to Your Posts tables: post_view_cap and post_comment_cap. Upon uninstall these changes will be removed completely, as well as it will remove any custom generated capability from your user's profiles. I'd like to do some more magic / science with it. And yes: I can code! Developer documentation can be found in the project wiki.

Please do so in the GitHub Repository.

Pull request are welcome in the GitHub Repository.