35 Tips Tricks To Manage and Handle Multi-Author Blogs
Inviting other bloggers and writers to become co-authors is one great way to expand one’s blog. Assuming the recruiting of writers part is being taken care of, the next big problem you could be facing is management. Managing multiple authors for a blog is never an easy task. It’s often a challenge to keep co-authors in control, getting them to write quality content on schedule, making sure they did not miss anything before hitting the publish button, etc. Also sometimes you might also want to give different authors different level of accessibilities and controls, depending on their performances.
Luckily there are lots of Wordpress plugins and resources out there to help owners and administrators to manage co-authors. If you are planning to turn your blog into a multi-author blog, here’s 35 Tips Tricks To Manage and Handle Multi-Author Blogs you might want to check out.
Managing Blog Posts
If you have more than 5 authors on a particular blog, managing the daily published entries can be tedious especially when rules and checklists are not properly laid out. Even if they are, they might not be followed at the times. Dealing with situations like this, some plugins could be your life-savers, or at least making blog postings more efficient.
- Future Posts CalendarAdds a simple month-by-month calendar that shows all the months you have future posts for (and the current month no matter what), it highlights the days you have posts for, and as an added bonus if you click a day the Post Timestamp boxes change to that day, month and year. Pretty handy to organize and plan blog post for a multi authors blog. Also comes in form of widget.
- Pre-Publish ReminderA friendly checklist for you and your co-authors before they hit the publish button to place any blog article live on the main page.
Similar plugins: Pre-Publish Reminders by Nick Ohrn, Category Remindr for those who forget inserting categories.
- Draft NotificationThis WordPress plugin automatically emails the admin when a new draft is saved. The email contains the post’s title, the author, and a link. There is no options page currently, because there is really nothing to configure. The plugin now supports the new ‘pending’ status.Similar Plugins: Draft Notifier
- Co-AuthorsAllows multiple authors to be associated with a post. Co-authored posts appear on a co-author’s posts page and feed. Additionally, co-authors may edit the posts they are associated with, and co-authors who are contributors may only edit posts if they have not been published (as is usual).
Similar Plugins: Multi Authors
- Audit Trail PluginAudit 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.
- Report PostsThis allows your user to report any post they find not appropriate. Think of it as seeking users help on quality control. Reported posts then appear in the manage section of the admin console.
- Gravatar plugin For Multiple AuthorsWordpress plugin that provides multi users to show their respective gravatars on their authored posts.
Managing Multi Authors
Sometimes you might want to give some authors a higher access over the others. By that we mean giving them the access to publish content without your moderation or perhaps access to sensitive areas you won’t share with the rest. These following plugins allow you to administrate your fellow authors the way you prefer.
- Role ManagerReworked from the previous version of Role Manager Plugin is written by David House and Owen Winkler. This plugin allows you to control roles and access for different authors on your blog.
Similar plugins: Role Scoper
- Draft ControlThe WordPress Plugin “Draft Control” allows users above level 5 to view drafts in a nice row paging system.
- Hide DashboardA pretty self-explanatory plugin. The reason why you would need this is when you have multiple authors on your blog and you want to hide (or customize) the dashboards.
- WP-Group RestrictionWp-group-restriction is a Wordpress plugin that enhances the current user role feature, by allowing administrators to manage access to content (i.e., pages).
- AdminimizeThe 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.
Authors Profiles
When co-authors write for your blog, the least you can do (if there’s no revenue sharing involved) is to publish a decent author’s profile as token of appreciation. Proper credits on authors are important, it shows how much you appreciate their work. Here are some plugins to place a decent Author’s Profile on blog post, or anywhere in the blog.
- Post AvatarSimplifies the process of including a picture when writing posts. Authors simply choose from a predefined list of images in the Write Post page to display an image in a post. A template tag displays the image with
The Loop. - User PhotoAllows you to associate authors’ profile photos with their account under Your Profile , or any other pages with the use of tags like
userphoto_the_author_photo(),userphoto_the_author_thumbnail()etc.
- Posts by Author PluginThis plugin will show the last X posts by the current author either at the bottom of every post, or where you manually specify in each post. Using the built-in options page, you can choose the number of posts to show, set the header text, choose to show the post dates, select the format of the date, and choose whether or not to include the current post in the list.
- Get Author ProfileAllows you to access an author’s profile manually outside
The Loop, such as for a sidebar intro of the blog owner or to list contributors to your blog. - UserextraThis plugin basically does two things. It adds the ability to associate extra information to users, and supports category access control where users are being control on which category they are allow to access and post article to.
- Author ExposedSimple Wordpress plugin that allows your visitors easy and elegant way to see more details about the post author.
- List Author WidgetDisplay a list of authors in your WordPress Sidebar Widgets linking to the authors.php page.
- Blog Matrix Wordpress PluginThis plugin provides a suite of extended WordPress sidebar, navigation and blog info template tags that can be filtered by author and category.
- Author CommentsHighlights author’s comments with customizable styles. Requires author to login.
Communication
Communication is perhaps the utmost important factor in any successful multi-author blogs. Not only it promotes sharing of ideas, getting each other mutually inspired, it also help prevent having 2 authors clasing on writing the same (or similar) blog topics.
- Share Notes on DashboardIf you blog with multiple persons, you can leave a message for the others. In the plugin file, you can determine, what capabilities a user must have to read the notes, and what capabilities he must have to write/modify them. By default, Authors and higher can write, and every registered user can read.
- Our Todo ListA plugin allowing authors to get together to share ideas and tasks with a managable section in Wordpress administration section.
- Send Private EmailAllowing blog owners to send private emails to authors and users.
Similar plugins: Email Users
- Multi Author Comment NotificationPlugin that sends comment notification to not only the specific author of the post, but to other authors of the blog as well. Customisable via admin panel.
Revenue Sharing
Last but not least – the moolah factor, the thing that drives and motivates (most) co-authors. Here are some plugins to make revenue sharing fair and square, or at least automated.
- Author AdvertisingThis plugin allows blog admins to create a revenue sharing program utilising one of the many advertising programs out there i.e Yahoo, Google Adsense, Amazon, Allposters etc. It can also be used as a banner manager, author photo/website widgets.Similar plugins: AdSense Revenue Sharing
Further Readings
- Wordpress: Roles and CapabilitiesIndepth explanation on how blog owner can control the ability of assigning roles to a user.
- Wordpress: Author TemplatesThis article explains how to change what happens when the blog viewer is visiting one of your site’s author pages.
- Creating an “About this Author” for Multiple AuthorsHow to insert About this Author at the end of every blog post.
(Source: http://www.hongkiat.com)
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