Permission to add news but not edit page or navigation

Brass Contributor

I have a communication site and I would like everyone in my organisation to be able to add news but not edit the site homepage or navigation. Is it possible to allow users to add news via the "+Add" on the news webpart but prevent them from being ably to edit the page that webpart is on, or the site navigation?

11 Replies
Because news are pages and pages library holds everything you can’t exactly out of the box. You could break permissions on each page and make them read only and then allow edit rights on the site pages library for the news. That way your pages are locked read only but the library will allow new pages for news.
Tried this but the users lose the "+Add" button on the webpart and they also cannot access the new page form.
It should work if you give edit rights to the entire library. Only restrict the main page or pages you don’t want them to edit?

Maybe I'm missing something, but does changing the users permissions from edit to contribute solve the issue?

We have discovered that if we give a user contribute access for the site and then read access for a page, we get the "+Add" buttons and the ability to add new pages but the "Edit" page and navigation buttons are hidden. Thanks for your help.

I’ve done something similar. Was hoping metadata would solve this but you can only use metadata page filters on the same site which makes sense but is a bummer. We need some kind of hub site columns feature now :).
Sorry, I had to edit my previous comment. We worked it out. Regarding your comment, I was hoping to use metadata for the whole hub too but sadly that's not the case. Our newsfeed is going to remain a stream of consciousness rather than a curated feed, with another newsfeed for other content categories.
Yeah. I ended up doing similar where I have another newsfeed web part pointing to a dedicated comm site I use for that news with different permissions than my hub root etc.

@Matthew Barker 

1. Assign the user to group with contributor role

2. Go to Setting > Site Content. Click Site Pages

3. Find the site's Home.aspx and click Details

4. Click Manage Access, find the group with contributor role and disable edit function (click at the pencil icon)

 

That should do the work.

@fazliaziz We made the parent site read only and then broke the inheritance on the site where we wanted users to be able to post news.

Heads-up, we're having an issue with the workaround of mark the home page as read-only and giving site contribute permissions. The Add > News post link for the News webpart won't work unless the user has edit access to the page the News web part appears on. This workaround seem to work in the past (before 10/15/2021). Here's what we've done to address this in case it's not a temporary glitch that Microsoft will fix:

- Create a separate page with instructions on creating news posts. We find this very helpful for just-in-time training.

- Add a link to the instruction page that links to the same page you get when clicking the "See All" link from a News web part. It's a system generated page that users with site contribute permissions can use the Add > News post link on, but they can't edit the actual page. The link will be something like "..._layouts/15/news.aspx?title=.....

- Add a button "Add News Post" and include it on the page where the News web part is posted. For us, this was a hub site home page marked read-only for our site Visitors group to prevent them from changing it.

- Deselect the "Show title and commands" option for the News web part to hide the Add button to avoid confusion as it won't work.