Seclude for Craft CMS

Installation

Requirements

  • Craft CMS 5.3 or later
  • PHP 8.2 or later

No other dependencies, and no build step.

Install

composer require justinholtweb/craft-seclude
php craft plugin/install seclude

Or find Seclude in the Craft Plugin Store and install it from there.

Seclude is free. There is one edition and nothing is held back.

Nothing changes until you write a policy

Installing Seclude restricts nobody. A section is only affected once an enabled policy names a user and covers it. Everything else carries on exactly as Craft's own permissions say.

This works because Seclude can only take away. Every decision it makes is either refuse or no opinion, never permit. A user still needs Craft's own permission for a section. Seclude narrows how much of that section the permission reaches. Switching Seclude on cannot widen anybody's access, and switching it off cannot leave anything locked.

Your first policy

Say a group of regional editors should edit only the News entries they wrote, plus a few picked for them by hand.

  1. Make sure the group already has Craft's own permissions for the News section. Seclude works inside those, so without them it has nothing to narrow.
  2. Go to Seclude → Policies and choose New policy.
  3. Under Who this applies to, pick the Regional editors group.
  4. Under What it governs, choose Entries and tick News.
  5. Under What they get, add Elements they authored and Elements assigned to them.
  6. Under What they may do, tick the abilities they should have. View, Edit and Propose changes are a good start.
  7. Save.

From now on a regional editor sees only those entries in the News index, and is refused any other News entry if they reach it some other way. Hand-pick extras on the Assignments screen.

Before you tell the team, check the result on Who can edit what.

Admins are never restricted

By default Seclude leaves admins alone, so there is always somebody who can undo a policy. You can change that under Settings, but think twice.

Coming from Isolate

trendyminds/isolate was Craft 3/4 only and was retired in February 2024. Seclude does what it did — per-entry assignment, per user, with a filtered index — and adds scopes, grants and abilities.

There is no automatic migration. The two assignment models are close enough that a short script writing to {{%seclude_assignments}} will move them across, and different enough that guessing would be worse than asking.