Content is king and getting co-authors / guest writers to post content on your blog is the easiest way to boost the quantity (and quality) of your blog. However, managing multiple writers is not an easy job – especially when they’re new and not familiar with your blog’s principles.
Luckily, there are many plugins for WordPress to assist you in handling multiple authors and their work. Here is a list of some best WordPress plugins to ease the management of authors. Note that all the plugins given below have minimum compatibility up to WordPress 3.0 version.
Recommended Reading: 35 Tips Tricks For Multi-Author Blogs
Shorcut to:
Managing Blog Posts
Publishing an article is a tedious process including drafting, reviewing, proof-reading and posting. If you run a high-quality blog and post multiple articles per day, then managing articles will be like a chore for you. Here are some WordPress plugins to aid you in managing and posting articles:
Editorial Calendar
This plugin makes it easy for you to view and schedule your post dates. You can manage posts by multiple authors, easily publish your posts or manage drafts. It’s easy to change post dates using drag and drop. It’s also possible to edit your post’s title, content, etc. right from the plugin.
It’s best suited for to keep track of when an article is to be published, so that they can prepare the articles ready for publication.
AJAX Calendar Future POSTS
This plugin shows a calendar using AJAX – with asynchronous navigation support, allowing you to browse the calendar without refreshing the page. It is a simple AJAX-ified calendar plugin which displays future scheduled posts and can also be added as a widget.
Good Writer Checkify
Blogging is not only about posting articles, it’s about posting excellent articles – this plugin helps you to maintain quality in your posts. You can use this plugin to put a check-list for authors, to check if they had missed out on anything important while writing/submitting their posts.
Recommended Reading: Bloggers: 5 Vital Things Before Hitting That Publish Button
Your list could have common items that you normally check through, like grammar, spelling, text links, crediting your images, etc, which your authors should check through before submitting the article. If everyone does their part, you would be able to spend more time managing the blogs rather than cleaning up the posts.
Similar plugins: Genki Pre-Publish Reminder by Genkisan, Category Reminder, reminds you to add categories to your posts.
Co-Authors Plus
This plugin allows you to assign multiple authors to a single post, page or custom post-types using a simple search-as-you-type input box. The assigned multi-authors will appear on post and feeds and they’ll be able to edit/view the draft post according to their user role permissions.
Audit Trail
This plugin maintains a log of information about what’s happening in your blog like who logged in and out of your blog and when, who edited which posts, etc. The best thing about this plugin is that it stores all drafts of your posts, modified at any time by any one.
Using these drafts log, you can easily restore your posts to an earlier version and also view the content revised/edited by any author. For example, you can use it to easily check who (which author) inserted an affiliate link in the post.
Managing Multi Authors
Too many cooks, well you know the rest. Having too many people have access to the same things can turn out to be a mess, if you don’t manage it well. There’s the authors, editors, moderators, proofreaders etc. They require different access and different permissions and this is when these plugins will come in handy.
User Access Manager
In one sentence, this plugin lets you rule your blog. It lets you assign different capabilities / permissions to different user groups, set access rules by user groups and post types, etc. There are many more options like hiding posts / pages, limiting access to uploads, giving access by IP address, etc.
Similar plugins: Role Scoper by Kevin, Advanced Access Manager, User Role Editor, Members
Adminimize
This plugin let you hide menus and sub-menus of your blog’s dashboard area. You can also hide meta boxes and other areas in the write post/page section. You can use it to hide unnecessary features from your authors and to provide them a simple and clean writing interface to boost their publishing efficiency.
Author profiles
Authors like to be appreciated for their writing and as a blog owner, it’s a must for you to properly credit your authors for their articles. But when the authors start coming in by the numbers then it’s time to get their data organized, with some help from these plugins.
Advanced Author Bio
It’s a simple plugin which does a decent job of crediting authors. It automatically places a small author box below every post. It has many small but interesting features like support to show Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn profiles and it can also show author’s homepage along with the author’s bio.
Similar plugins: DT Author Box has the additional feature of allowing authors to add custom avatars (and not only gravatars) to their bio.
Author Spotlight (widget)
This plugin adds a widget, which can show an author’s profile of posts as a widget in the sidebar. You just need to drag it to your sidebar and it works automatically, it detects the author of the post and displays his/her information.
If you don’t like having the author’s bio at the bottom of the post, then this plugin is for you.
WordPress Author Profile Avatars List
This plugin can be used to show avatars of all your blog’s authors in one place in your sidebar. It’s easy to make it work for you.
Similar plugins: Authors Widget, Author Avatars List, Author Image(s)
Cimy User Extra Fields
This plugin lets you add various custom-defined fields in user’s profile. It also unlocks WordPress provided user fields to be shown on registration forms. It also has some cool features like custom avatar, image uploads on registration page, email confirmation for new users, custom welcome emails to new users, etc.
Communication
Communication is the living soul of any collaborative community. WordPress don’t provide any feature for multiple users to communicate among themselves. But, of course, there are plugins to solve this problem.
Peter’s Post Notes
It’s a simple to use Notes plugin for your blog. This plugin puts a Notes area in the writing screens, which can be used to enhance collaborative work between multiple authors working on a single article. It also puts a Notes area in the dashboard, which can be used to keep notes and share ideas between authors and other users of the blog.
Similar plugin: Dashboard Notepad – adds a Notepad area in your blog’s dashboard, with permission settings.
Cleverness To-Do List
This plugin adds a To Do list in the blog’s dashboard. There can be multiple lists: private lists for each user, shared to-do list between all users and a master to-do list for individual completion of items on the checklist.
Similar plugin: To Do List
Private Messages for WordPress
This plugin adds private mail functionality in your blog – registered users can send private messages/mails between each other, just like a forum. Each user will have their own inbox and outbox.
This plugin has got additional settings, which blog admins can use to put restrictions on the usage of private messages by users.
Revenue Sharing
By integrating revenue sharing on your blog, you’ll be attracting a large group of co-authors and guest bloggers, who write articles to earn a living.
Last but not the least, here are plugins to manage revenue sharing between different authors in a multi-author blog.
Author Advertising Plugin
This plugin will fulfil all your needs of offering ad slots to co-authors of your WordPress blog and sharing ad revenue with them. The plugin provides you total control on the ad slots, percentage of admin to author ads, their content and placement, author’s information, etc.
Similar plugin: Advertwhirl Advertising Manager and Ad Rotator
WP eBay Ads
This plugin allows you to easily manage eBay ads on your blog. It offers you various features like shortcode to place ads in the post, share revenues on a multi-authors blog, set the percentage of revenue to share, share revenues with the post’s author, etc.
WordPress Plugins to Manage A Multi-Authored Blog
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.