Bryan Lazaris
It is not at all easy to manage and supervise work to multiple-authors for your blog. To keep the thoughts and rights of the co-authors in a control state you may have to put a lot of challenging observations like controlling the similar quality and flow as well as covering the entire information. To exercise the better ways you can even provide different accessibility powers to different authors according to your requirements.
Fortunately there are lots of WordPress plug-ins and resources which play a vital role in managing multi author blogs and assist the owners and administrators to manage their co-authors. We are dedicating this post to all those bloggers who are planning to turn their blog into a multi-author blog. We are hereby providing several smart tricks and tips which will help the bloggers in managing and handling multi-author blogs. We have divided the entire post into five categories and kept the tricks or plug-ins under certain category as mentioned below. So, get ready to check out these tricks.
Managing Blog Posts
In case if there are more than 5 authors on a particular blog, then, management of daily published entries of such blogs really become a tedious job especially when rules and checklists are not properly laid out. Below is some of the effective plug-ins which can serve as life-savers for you and make your blog postings more efficient.
Future Posts Calendar
This plug-in, which also comes in the form of widget, adds a simple month-by-month calendar that highlights the days you have posts for and shows all the months you have future posts for. It is pretty enough and handy to systematize and plan blog post for a multi authors blog.
Pre-Publish Reminder
It is a friendly checklist for you and your co-authors which remind you before publishing any post; as soon as you hit the publish button to place any blog article live on the main page, it works as a reminders.
Draft Notification
This is really an important WordPress plug-in that automatically emails the admin when a new draft is saved. The email contains the post’s title, the author, and a link.
Audit Trail Plug-in
Audit Trail is a remarkable plug-in that keeps track of what is going on inside your blog just by recording certain actions such as who logged in and when etc. This plug-in stores all these information in the form of a log. Besides this, it records the full contents of posts (and pages) and allows you to restore a post to a previous version at any time.
Gravatar plug-in for Multiple Authors
It is an effective WordPress plug-in that provides multi users to show their respective gravatars on their authored posts.
Managing Multi Authors
Most of the time it happens that, you want to give some authors a higher access priority over the others. In other words, we can say that you want to give them access to some sensitive areas which you won’t like to share with the rest of the authors. In this situation you need to manage each author in a different manner and style. Below are presented some of the important plug-ins that will allow you to administrate your fellow authors in your own way.
Role Manager
Role Manager Plug-in allows you to control roles and access for different authors on your blog in your own way as per your preference.
Draft Control
This WordPress Plug-in allows you to assign rights to the users above level 5 to view drafts in a nice row paging system.
WP-Group Restriction
WP-group-restriction is an efficient WordPress plug-in that augments the existing user role feature. It permits the administrators to manage access to content or pages.
Adminimize
This plug-in amends the administration backend and gives you the authority to consign rights to different authors on certain parts. Admin Panel reserves right to activate or deactivate any part of the menu and even parts of the submenu and this is done by this plug-in.
Author Profiles
Appreciation plays a vital role in boosting up the productivity. So, when co-authors write for your blog, it is required for you to at least appreciate their work by publishing a decent author’s profile. Below are mentioned some important plug-ins which will assist you a lot in placing a decent Author’s Profile on blog post, or anywhere in the blog so that they must feel encouraged.
Post Avatar
Post Avatar is a WordPress plug-in that simplifies the process of including a picture while writing posts. Authors need simply choose from a predefined list of images in the Write Post page to display an image in a post. This plug-in display the image in a loop and its functionality is somewhat similar to live-journal userpics.
User Photo
User Photo is a remarkable plug-in which allows a user to associate a profile photo with their account through their “Your Profile” page. With the help of this plug-in admins may add a user profile photo by accessing the “Edit User” page. Using this plug-in, uploaded image is resized to fit the dimensions specified on the options page; a thumbnail image correspondingly is also generated. This plug-in can associate user photo within a post or a comment in order to help identifying the author.
Author Exposed
Author exposed is a simple WordPress plug-in that allows visitors easy and elegant way to make out more details about the post author.
List Author Widget
List Author Widget, as the name reveals, displays a list of authors in your WordPress Sidebar Widgets linking to the authors.php page. It optionally excludes Administrator account from the list and uses either full names or login names in the list. It works in current versions of all browsers.
Communication
When it comes to the handling of multi author blogs, communication takes perhaps the utmost important role. Communicating with each other develops mutual understanding and brings authors closer to each other. Effective communication not only promotes sharing of ideas, getting each other mutually inspired, but also help in preventing the clash which arise when 2 authors writes on the similar blog topics.
Share Notes on Dashboard
Share Notes on Dashboard, as the name reveals, it is a useful plug-in for your dashboard offering an area to quickly write down things what is in mind. It is quite obvious that if you blog with multiple persons, hem some time you need to leave a message for the others. This is one of the most important plug-in that lets you to determine what capabilities a user must have to read the notes, and what capabilities he must have to write/modify them. By default, what happens that authors can write, and every registered user can read notes on Dashboard?
Send Private Email
This is another important WordPress plug-in which allows blog owners to send private emails to authors and users. By default, WordPress lacks the ability to send emails to registered users but this gap is filled by this plug-in. Using this plug-in one can send emails to his/her blog users.
Multi Author Comment Notification
This is a powerful plug-in which is customizable via admin panel and that sends comment notification to not only the specific author of the post, but to other authors of the blog as well.
Revenue Sharing
Top to all things, revenue sharing is the most important thing that drives and motivates most of the co-authors. Below are provided some important plug-ins which will make revenue sharing fair and square or at least automated.
Author Advertising
This is another important WordPress plug-in which allows blog admins to create a revenue sharing program with the help of various advertising programs such as Yahoo, Google Adsense, Amazon, All posters etc. Apart from this, it can also be used as a banner manager, author photo/website widgets etc.
AdSense Revenue Sharing
AdSense Revenue Sharing is a WordPress plug-in which provides you a nice admin area with live ad preview and allows you to easily display ads in your posts by using a quick tag and share your adsense impressions with your friends and co-authors. In order to display the ads you can either insert anywhere in your post or use the quick tag button. It enables you to insert your ads in you posts and pages at faster pace. Also you are free to add as many co-authors as you desire.
