Private post hidden from Admin too

Question

I have a strange problem.

I am running a woocommerce site with several levels of privileges/roles. I wanted to reserve a group of products for specific users and was anticipating modifying the user capabilities so that group could see the "private" products.

However: after setting a product page to private I went to the front end as administrator and the product was not visible. I returned the page to public and the item re-appears. I've exhausted the investigation for capabilities as admin at level 10 should be able to see private posts. As a matter of fact all the capabilities are selected for private posts using a capabilities management plugin.

Anyone want to venture an opinion as to why an admin would not be able to see a private post?

Just to be clear; I am using private (NOT password protected hidden)

Answer 1

By default, WordPress posts set to private are visible to admins, and you can distinguish them on the frontend because they have 'Private:' prepended to their title.

However, you might have plugins installed that are modifying this behaviour. It could be your capability management plugin, or it could be WooCommerce. The specifics of third-party plugins are off-topic here, so the best I can advise you is to disable these plugins one-by-one to see which causes it, and then ask at that plugin's support forum for assistance.

In summary, the problem is most likely that a plugin is modifying default WordPress behaviour here.