How to 'unpublish' or 'hide' posts when user role changes?

Question

I'm working on a website that assigns different roles to different users - and I'm looking a functionality I would probably best describe as 'reverse access control':

First, users of role "A" are allowed to publish content of type "A". If a user changes to role "B" he/she is not longer allowed to publish content of type "A".

Now I would want to find a way to 'unpublish' or 'hide' whatever that user has published while he/she was still assigned the user role "A". Currently I can think of the following two possible approaches:

1. All posts are still published, but only the author and admins can see it.
2. All posts are unpublished when the user role changes.

To me approach 1 sounds more practical – so in case the user switches back to role "A" everything would instantly be visible again.

I had a look at various plugins such as Members and User Role Editor but none seems to have that type of functionality – or am I missing something completely? Any pointers would be appreciated. Thank you!

Answer 1

Interesting functionality, you will need something that does this:

• Will need to use the hook set_user_role to detect when user role change
• Then will need to query all posts from that user
• Then use wp_update_post to change the post status

Answer 2

option 1 is definitely easier and less prone to errors/accidents than changing publish settings every time an author changes roles.

To do so globally you should add a filter to the_content (and other content items in your page/post loops) which checks for the author's role and return some text to inform the viewer that the content is not currently available.