Some accounts should not be found in the staff directory: shared mailboxes, service accounts, test users, contractors, or someone who has left but whose account is kept for the content they wrote. Hide from directory takes a person out of the directory and search while leaving their account, their content and their profile page intact.
Hide a person
- Go to Users, find the person and select Edit. Or open their profile on the intranet and select Edit.
- Scroll to the Admin settings group at the bottom of the profile. Administrators see it on the WordPress profile screen; on the intranet’s own edit page it appears for anyone who is allowed to edit other users.
- Switch on Hide from directory.
- Select Update User, or Save profile on the intranet page.
To bring someone back, switch it off again. The directory refreshes as soon as the profile is saved.
Where a hidden person no longer appears
- The staff directory: their letter is skipped on the A to Z bar if nobody else shares it, and they have no card.
- Team pages: they are not listed as a member of any team.
- The organisation tree on their manager’s profile: they are not shown as a direct report.
- Staff listings made with the
[people]shortcode. - Search results and autocomplete suggestions. Hidden people are left out of the Relevanssi index, and filtered out of results in case an old index still has them. If you hide someone and they still turn up in search, rebuild the index under Settings, Relevanssi Premium, Indexing.
- The person picker on Wonderwall entries.
Where a hidden person still appears
- Their profile page. Anyone who knows the address, /staff/username/, or follows an old link can still open it. Hiding is not the same as making a profile private.
- As a Team lead on a team page, if they are named as one. Remove them from the team’s Team lead(s) box as well.
- As the line manager on the profiles of people who report to them. Update those profiles if the person has left.
- As the author of anything they wrote.
Hiding compared with deleting
Hiding keeps the account, so the person can still log in and their content keeps its author. For someone who has left, the safer long-term step is to delete the account under Users, attributing their content to another user when WordPress asks, or to remove many leavers at once with the Remove users plugin. Hide first if you need time to reassign their content or their direct reports.
For how the directory is put together, see Set up the staff directory; if someone is missing who should not be, see Problems with the staff directory and profiles.