9 Best Plugins for Managing Multi-Author WordPress Blogs
A personal WordPress blog is no big deal: WordPress stakes its reputation on that. Managing a multi-author WordPress website, though, is much more like running a newspaper – in fact, we wouldn’t be surprised if that’s exactly why you’re reading this. Clearly, this requires some advanced access control and management tools you just don’t need when not dealing with multiple authors and contributors. These are some of the plugins which cover all the functionalities we believe are necessary. Think of it as a Swiss army knife – you may not need all of them all the time (or ever), but you want to know they’re there just in case you do.
PublishPress is a free plugin designed to facilitate publication scheduling and editorial work. It comes with many important functions, chief among which is the publishing calendar. Featuring a simple drag-and-drop interface, you can use it to follow easily each and every bit of content. You can also easily change the publication date of your posts by dragging them backwards or forwards on the calendar.
Using this plugin, you can also set up custom statuses, reminders and notifications for each piece of content: give your contributors a heads-up when their pitch is accepted, when a first draft is due, when it is under review, and, finally, out for the world to marvel at. You can also create and manage user roles, and send these custom notifications to each individual role.
PublishPress also integrates with Slack, in case you are using this tool to communicate with your contributors.
Edit Flow promises a modular approach to workflow management, especially when you yourself are not the editor, or not the only editor. It sports an easy calendar overview to plan and schedule your posts, while also allowing you to attach custom statuses (for crucial stages of post development) and editorial comments to each one of your posts. You can also assign metadata to each of the posts: data consisting of however many fields you like, covering topics such as required word count, draft due dates, required keywords and the like.
The plugin also supports user groups, allowing you to organize your contributors however you find most efficient.
Obviously, you should also be on the lookout for an access control solution. Simply managing user roles might not be enough – you want a secure login. You need to make sure that not just anybody can log in as an author or authorized contributor and just post whatever they like on your website. We recommend adding another layer of security to your author login page, and we think the WordPress 2-Step Verification plugin is the way to go.
This free and simple plugin gives you three alternative second steps (apart from user name and password login): an app, text messaging, or single-use code. We have discussed the functioning of this plugin in another article, detailing two-step authentication.
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A simple and functional plugin, Pre-Publish Checklist is more or less explained by its name itself: it lets you create a checklist and assign it to any specific post type you like, and attach a message for your contributors. This way, each time they attempt to publish a post, they will get an additional prompt, making them tick all the tasks the editors have placed before them. Is the featured image in place? Have they run a spell checker? Did the editor in charge okay the post? Has the post’s SEO been checked? Of course, the checklist can be overridden in case a post requires urgent publication.
You will also be able to see how many tasks have been ticked for each post, and also filter posts by state of checklist, making this a quick way of ensuring nothing gets overlooked.
You may also want to restrict or allow access to certain actions and content depending on your contributor’s role in your organization. User Role Editor is a free plugin which allows you to do just that. You can also create custom roles (from the ground up or by copying and tweaking an existing role), and assign capabilities to your contributors either collectively or individually, on a case-to-case basis. This way, each one of your contributing users can have access to what they need to do their work and nothing else.
This simple plugin deals with an issue which may arise due to WordPress keeping and tracking every single draft and version of every single post. You may think that the issue is slow loading time, but that is not true – only one version will be loaded at any one time. The slowdown may occur on the back end, with multiple versions being tracked. WP Revisions Control, however, deals not only with that, but also with human error: too many saved versions of a document may cause confusion for your contributing users and editors. With this plugin, you can choose how many revisions of each post you want to keep on your website. Once this number is exceeded, WordPress will simply delete the oldest revision, so we recommend a backup of original drafts, just in case.
Despite what you might surmise from its name, Adminimize does not minimize ads (for better or for worse) – it minimizes admin interface. Not all website administrators and not all editors are skilled WordPress users, and they don’t need to be. With this free plugin, you can pare down an admin’s back end to a more manageable interface. This accomplishes two things: not only does it make your admins’ work easier, it also precludes them from mistakenly causing website issues – they simply can’t see anything you disallow them to see.
WordPress uses Gravatar for user profiles by default, giving your contributing authors a chance to express themselves. This is all well and good, but if you want some uniformity the better to suit your overall style, or if some of your contributors’ avatars are content-inappropriate (violent or lewd, for instance, while you are running a family-friendly blog), we recommend you try Simple Local Avatars.
It allows you to upload new profile pictures, strictly for your website, which they can then rate. If you know and trust your contributors, it will also let you permit them to upload their own avatars. Of course, if you are satisfied with your prospective contributor’s Gravatar image, you can simply avoid uploading a local avatar and let Gravatar step in.
Finally, we give you User Submitted Posts. This free plugin allows you to create a form on the front end of your website through which the visitors can submit their own posts without being logged in, if you so choose. The form is comprehensive, and it works just fine out-of-the-box, but each of the fields can be modified or discarded as needed. With just a few clicks of the mouse on your part, your website will be open to user-generated content. For extra safety, this plugin integrates with Google reCAPTCHA.
In Conclusion
Well, this about covers the functionalities you need for successful running of a multi-author blog. WordPress prides itself on simplicity, but creating content for and running a blog is no mean feat. Managing multiple authors is something else entirely.
Think of this article as a toolbox we have assembled for you. Take from it what you need, and make your multi-author WordPress website truly your own. After all, you know your visitors, your contributors, your editors, and your administrators best. Make creating content together as easy and as streamlined as you can.
