20 Tips To Manage Multi-Author Blogs
There are many ways to improve the ranks of your blog. One of the most exciting among them is inviting new authors to join the team of your writers. The advantages are numerous: more opinions, more posts and, as a result, more readers. However, a blog leaded by several writers will also require extra time and efforts for managing the process.
One of the easiest platforms for creating a multi-author blog is WordPress. The platform is easy in use, works well for SEO and has a lot of tools for bloggers. That’s why in this post we’ll speak mainly about this CMS. If you have some experts ready to write texts for your project, check out our set of 20 great WordPress plugins that will make your life easier in the field of blog management.
1. Co-Authors
This fantastic tool will be helpful for authors cooperation. If you have several writers knowledgeable in the same sphere, this plugin will help them create an article together without superadmin rights. All you need is just to choose other authors who can edit a certain text, and they will get access to editing the chosen articles. Note that the co-authors can only edit unpublished posts.
2. Future Posts Calendar
A handy calendar that lets you manage numerous scheduled posts. You get a monthly calendar with all planned posts indicated. The plugin allows you to change post date — just click on a certain date, and the day of publishing will change automatically. Another good thing — you can use this calendar in widget mode, so that all your authors have it at hand.
3. Draft Notification
If you have many authors writing for a blog, it is important to control the deadlines. This plugin will send an email to blog admins whenever a draft of a post is saved. This helps to keep updated about the progress of upcoming posts. The email you get through this plugin contains the author’s name, the title of the draft, and a link for checking out the fresh post-to-be.
4. User Photo
Blog readers prefer to know how the authors look like. This smart plugin associates the photo from the author’s profile with user account. This will reduce the amount of time you need for publishing a well-looking post. As a result, the chosen picture will be displayed in authors’ posts, comments and personal profile.
5. Get Author Profile
Get Author Profile is a plugin that helps to access a profile of your author or reader outside of The Loop. This function can be used for displaying quick author info in a sidebar intro.
6. To Do List
Really, to-do lists are always helpful if you’re a project manager. If you work with multiple blog authors, this plugin will be a perfect tool to use. You can add new tasks, check priority, and mark some points in the list as completed. This tool is good not only for admins, but also for authors themselves, as they can easily access the list of needed posts, and plan their time with higher efficiency.
7. Genki Pre-Publish Reminder
And here comes another tool that will make your writers’ life easier. By means of this simple plugin you can create a checklist that will be displayed in post sidebar. In this checklist you can enumerate different style and formatting points that authors have to check in their posts before publishing or scheduling them.
8. WP-Report Posts
Here’s a good tool for controlling the quality of your content. When you have many writers, it’s hard to check each and every text for mistakes. After you install this plugin, your blog readers will be able to inform you about inappropriate content: broken links, copyrights infringement and abusive information. A big advantage of this plugin is that you can adjust a lot of options.
9. CBNET Multi-Author Comment Notification
This plugin is good for communicating within the team. It allows you to check users or groups of users that will get notifications about new comments. Use this tool for operative corrections. For instance, when a user posts a comment about a mistake, the author who’ll see this note first will correct it as soon as possible.
10. Highlight Author Comments
With this plugin the authors’ comments will be highlighted. This is specially convenient for your blog readers, as they often look for extra info provided by the author in the comments. In this plugin you can customize the style of highlight, but it requires the author to login.
11. Role Manager
An extremely convenient application that will add a special Role table to your WP admin page. You will be able to assign different functions to many users. The plugin will give you the maximum use if you have more than 10 people with access to admin pages. It will organize the process extremely well, and you’ll be pleased by the result.
12. WP-Group Restriction
This is another good tool for managing admin rights in multi-author blogs. The plugin extends the User Role feature, and lets you manage administrators with higher efficiency. WP-Group Restriction is specially good if you want to prohibit some writers to access to certain admin pages or WordPress tools.
13. List Authors Widget
This nice widget will automatically place the list of your authors on the sidebar. Along with hyperlinked names, regular readers will also enjoy the option of RSS subscription for the posts of the author they like. All authors come with userpics, so it will look specially gorgeous if all your authors have profile pictures.
14. Adminimize
Adminimize is good not only for multi-writer blogs, but for regular ones, too. It helps you hide numerous unnecessary tools or menu controls that you don’t use. Use it to make the process of blog administration more comfortable.
15. Share Notes on Dashboard
A great tool for in-team communication. The plugin allows your authors and admins to leave some notes on the Dashboard. The notes may regard some mistakes, schedule points, tasks, and other working moments. You can also choose user categories that can view the notes.
16. Posts by Author Plugin
If you know that some readers visit your website for reading the articles of some exact authors, you can install this plugin to promote other articles by these writers. With Post by Author, you will be able to add several other posts of this or that writer in the end of every their post. A simple function, but it’s very useful.
17. Userextra
The plugin allows admins to add extra information about your users. You can also manage user roles and groups through it with higher efficiency.
18. Author Exposed
A great plugin for quick author info. It lets you set a userpic, add a couple of words about the author, and his contacts. Really, your guests will admire this smart function.
19. Send Private Email
The plugin will help you manage mail better. With it you don’t need to go and search for authors’ emails in post clients. Just push one button — and you are already writing an email to the user/admin you need.
20. Author Advertising
Finally, a plugin that allows you to share incomes with authors through advertising. You can determine the percentage of your ads and your writers’ ads. The authors can choose the position and the content of their ads, but you can moderate it, of course.
Conclusion
Lots of handy tools are ready for using. Just a couple of clicks, and you get great plugins that help you manage a multi-author blog with great efficiency and lots of joy. Communication, page design, authors info — all this can be improved with a little help of plugins in our list. Hope you’ve found them helpful, and they will serve you well.