Non Administrator roles are no longer able to change the Template in the Post Editor

[fabiankaegy]

Description

Since the update to unify the PostTemplatePanel in #56817 any non administrator user roles have lost the ability to switch between available templates.

Before:

After:

Step-by-step reproduction instructions

1. Make sure your theme supports at least 1 additional custom template besides the default single post template.
2. Open the post editor with a user account that is an Editor or lower role
3. See that you are no longer able to switch between the available templates

[fabiankaegy]

CC: @youknowriad I believe this is a regression caused in #56817 that I think has a high severity and needs to get fixed before the release of WordPress 6.5

[t-hamano]

This problem doesn't seem to occur with the classic theme. On the other hand, in the block theme, for non-admin users, the panel doesn't seem to render because templateId ( wp.data.select('core/editor').getCurrentTemplateId() ) is null here.

gutenberg/packages/editor/src/components/post-template/panel.js

Line 58 in a99575c

if ( isBlockTheme && !! templateId ) {

[fabiankaegy]

My uneducated guess here is that the custom post type that stores templates is inaccessible for anyone that isn't an admin. And maybe this is as easy as changing the post type access preferences so that any user can view them, but only editors can edit them.

Or the issue is that the post type is already setup that way. But the useSelect hook here doesn't pass the context view along the request.

Either way I think once the access issue is sorted I have a hunch that it will uncover a UI issue because the template locked mode shows the toast notification to tell direct a user to the edit template mode. Which obviously shouldn't happen for any non admin roles since they cannot edit the template.

But as far as I'm aware we never needed to care about that distinction because the site editor where this is coming from was admin only anyways.

[carlomanf]

There is another related bug at #51886, perhaps both could get fixed together.

[aryanjasala]

My uneducated guess here is that the custom post type that stores templates is inaccessible for anyone who isn't an admin.

This seems to be the case, the capabilities for all the operations (read, update, delete, create) are being set to edit_theme_options which won't be available to roles other than administrator/super-admin.

I've tried accessing via the editor role and the Template option is not there, but on the other hand, if you add the capability for edit_theme_options to your user, you can access the Template option with any role

[getdave]

Noting that this needs to be (will be) resolved for WordPress 6.5.

@youknowriad has this on his radar and has an idea which is to use the previous UI for non-administrators like we do for classic themes.

[Mamaduka]

@fabiankaegy, should we close this now that #58485 is merged?

[fabiankaegy]

@Mamaduka yeah let's close it. I still think #58301 is the real solution for the issue where as what we merged is only a hotfix. But the issue described here in this ticket is technically solved.