8 Essential WordPress Plugins Improving Management of Multi Author Blogs

Most blogs is started by individuals working hard to produce quality content to attract readers. This is not an easy job for one person why successful bloggers quite often invite gust authors to contribute. This is not a bad idea at all and may significantly improve the quality and potential of a blog as new ideas, more knowledge, more writing muscles will attract more readers. Starting of with guest authors most bloggers simply receive the articles by mail and publish them. This works OK and full control is maintained. On the other hand it is not the most efficient way to get things done. WordPress allow you to invite other authors into the back end and still keep things under control and with the right plugins in place managing multiple authors become easy and almost fun.. Having authors in your WordPress system provides several advantages for you, your authors and your readers. Let’s see why and what plugins can do for you.

Edit Flow

This is an interesting plugin to investigate if you’re in a multi author situation. The overall goal of this plugin is to improve the WordPress Admin interface for a multi-user newsroom’s editorial workflow. One of the important improvements over basic WordPress is the new states a post can be assigned.

This new metadata can be used to filter posts, making it easy for the main blogger or editor in chief to get an overview of new posts ready to be reviewed.

Role Scoper

Role Scoper is a comprehensive access control solution, giving you CMS-like control of reading and editing permissions. Assign restrictions and roles to specific pages, posts or categories. Your WordPress core role definitions remain unchanged, and continue to function as default permissions. User access is altered only as you expand it by assigning content-specific roles, or reduce it by setting content-specific restrictions. Feature list is huge and you need to go and take a look yourself.

Capability Manager

The Capability Manager plugin provides a simple way to manage role capabilities. Using it, you will be able to change the capabilities of any role, add new roles, copy existing roles into new ones, and add new capabilities to existing roles. You can also delegate capabilities management to other users. In this case, some restrictions apply to this users, as them can only set/unset the capabilities they have. With the Backup/Restore tool, you can save your Roles and Capabilities before making changes and revert them if something goes wrong.

Adminimize

The plugin changes the administration backend and gives you the power to assign rights on certain parts. Admins can activate/deactivate every part of the menu and even parts of the submenu. Certain parts of the write menu can be deactivated separately for admins or non-admins. The header of the backend is minimized and optimized to give you more space and the structure of the menu gets changed to make it more logical – this can all be done per user so each user can have his own settings.

cbnet Multi Author Comment Notification

By default WordPress sends notifications of new comments to the author of the post only. If you have a blog where there are 3 authors who writes for this blog then they will get notification of new comments for those post which they have written themselves only. This plugins makes it possible to manage comments in a multi author blog.

Author Image

The author image plugin for WordPress lets you easily add author images on your site. With multiple authors this will make it faster for readers to recognize favorite authors on your site. It creates a widget that you can insert in a sidebar. Alternatively, place the following call in the loop where you want the author image to appear:  <?php the_author_image(); ?>

Audit Trail

Audit Trail is a plugin to keep track of what is going on inside your blog. It does this by recording certain actions (such as who logged in and when) and storing this information in the form of a log. Not only that but it records the full contents of posts (and pages) and allows you to restore a post to a previous version at any time. With multiple authors working in your WordPress instance it may be extremely useful in certain situations to be able look back in time and see what actually happened.

Pre-Publish Reminders

Your reminders are input through the WordPress administration interface, and you can format them in a variety of ways. You can change the text color, background color, and make the text strong, emphasized, and underlined. Reminders are stored as posts in the database.

When displaying the reminders, each reminder has a checkbox that you can check to mark that you’ve completed that item. The item will be dimmed when the checkbox is checked and undimmed when unchecked. Use this feature to make sure that you’ve completed everything that you should have. Checked reminders will stay checked after saving a post.