Listings: Public/Private/Unlisted

If user login is not required to view the directory:

• public: The entry is visible to all regardless if user is logged in or not.
• private: Visible to logged in users only. By default, all logged in user roles.
• unlisted: Visible only to logged-in users who can view the Connections Manage admin screen based on role capability. By default, admin, author, and editor roles only.

If user login is required to view the directory:

• public: Visible to logged in users only base on role capability. By default, all logged in user roles.
• private: Visible to logged in users only base on role capability. By default, all logged in user roles.
• unlisted: Visible only to logged-in users who can view the Connections Manage admin screen. By default, admin, author, and editor roles only.

On the Connections Roles admin page, you will find the WordPress User Roles and their assigned Connections capabilities.

If login is not required to view the directory, you will have the “View Private Entries” and “View Unlisted Entries” capabilities shown as options.

If login is required, you will have the “View Public Entries”, “View Private Entries”, and “View Unlisted Entries” capabilities shown as options.

You can assign these capabilities by WordPress Role.

When adding/editing an entry, the repeatable fields, address, phone, email, etc., also have a visibility status.

If an Entry is “public”, you can set the phone to “private” so only logged-in users can view it (based on the assigned role capabilities).

The visibility status of these does not override the top-level entry visibility.

For example, if an entry is “unlisted,” setting an address to “public” does not make that address visible to all. It would still only be visible to the admin (based on the assigned role capabilities).

Please note, using the WordPress feature of setting a page or post as private does nothing to secure the content in the directory. The entry data is still visible via the WordPress REST API and the WordPress SEO Sitemaps.

I hope this helps, please let me know.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by Steven.

Hi Steve,

So, next question:

Please note, using the WordPress feature of setting a page or post as private does nothing to secure the content in the directory. The entry data is still visible via the WordPress REST API and the WordPress SEO Sitemaps.

After we discovered this, I installed the AIOSEO plugin on our WordPress site, and on this page (which is now back in draft mode), I have the robots setting as:
`Robots meta:
No Index
No Follow
No Archive
No Translate
No Image Index
No Snippet
No ODP

Also, I went into robots.txt and set this page to not be found by the bot crawlers.

It has been suggested that I create a new directory page with a different name, go into the robots.txt and note that page, and set the SEO with these settings, keep the page password protected. Do you have any other suggestions (we would also delete the old page).

Connections integrates with the core WordPress SEO Sitemaps and the Sitemaps created by both Rank Math and Yoast SEO. There is no integrated support for AIOSEO. Perhaps AIOSEO utilizes the core WordPress Sitemaps feature, the last I looked; it was not possible to add custom sitemap providers to AIO SEO. If this is still the case, I would not expect Connections data to be present in the AIOSEO Sitemap.

Regarding the robots.txt, the only advice I can give is to do what is applicable for that page and your SEO goals for it.

Setting a page password or setting it private will not protect the directory entries if you only want them to be visible to logged-in users.

A detail I forgot in my initial reply.

Setting the directory to require a login will exclude Connections entries from being listed in the Sitemap.

If login is not required to view the directory; if an entry is set to private or unlisted, it will not be listed in the Sitemap.

I hope this helps, please let me know.