Why is there a padlock on this menu?

A padlock beside a menu entry, a settings tab or a page heading means one thing only: that feature belongs to a plan the club’s subscription does not include yet. It is not a fault, it is not something you have done, and it is nothing to do with what you personally are allowed to do at the club.

The entry is left where it is on purpose. Hiding it would look tidier and be worse — a treasurer who cannot find Accounting in the settings assumes Pavilion does not do accounts, and never asks what it would cost. So the padlocked screens stay in the menu, and opening one tells you what the feature does, which plan it is in, what that plan costs and what else comes with it.

Nothing behind a padlock is deleted

Locking decides which screens open. It never touches the club’s records. Everything already entered stays exactly where it is, and unlocking a plan makes those screens work on the data you already have — there is nothing to restore, nothing to re-import and nothing to type in again.

The other places a padlock shows

• Settings tabs stay in the row and still open. The explanation appears in place of the form.
• Blocks on the club’s own website — a shortcode belonging to a locked feature shows members nothing at all, because the club’s pages are no place for an advertisement of ours. Somebody signed in as an administrator sees a short dashed note saying which feature it was, so an empty space is never a mystery to the person who can do something about it.
• Buttons in the apps that reach a locked feature are refused with a message naming the feature and the plan, rather than appearing to work and quietly doing nothing.

Where to go

Pavilion → Tools → Licensing lists all three plans with a tick or a padlock against every feature, so you can see the whole picture rather than the one screen you happened to open. The padlocked screen itself carries the same links.

Common questions

We pay for that feature and it still has a padlock.

Almost always the wrong download. The plans are separate packages, and the features of a bigger plan are not in a smaller one at all, so a licence on its own cannot unlock them. The Licensing screen says “Not in this package” against those features, and a banner appears across the Pavilion screens telling you the same thing. Install the package from your confirmation email — see “Upgrading to a bigger plan”.

It worked last week and now it has a padlock.

Two things do that. Either the club’s subscription has lapsed, or the sixty-day window for clubs that already had Pavilion has closed. Both have their own help topic, and neither has deleted anything.

A member says a page on our website has gone blank.

That page carries a block belonging to a locked feature — the newsletter archive or the club store, for instance. Members see nothing rather than an advert. Open the page while signed in as an administrator and a note will tell you which feature it was; then either unlock it or take the block off the page.

Can we take the padlocked entries out of the menu?

There is no setting for it. They are deliberately left in place so that nobody at the club has to read a website to find out what Pavilion can do, and so that a club can see what it would be buying before it buys it.

Is this the same as “Sorry, you are not allowed to access this page”?

No, and it is worth telling them apart. That message is WordPress saying your user account has not been given the permission — see the Permissions topic. A padlock is Pavilion saying the club’s plan does not include the feature, which is a decision for the committee rather than for whoever manages the logins.