Creating a multi-author blog is the way to go if you want to get your blog updated regularly and drive tons of traffic. A blog which gets updated on a daily basis will get more traffic than the one which gets updated once in fifteen days (considering the quality at the same level).
However, it is really difficult for a single writer to post daily and maintain the quality at top level because an article needs time, effort, and research.
If you look at the top blogs like Mashable or Tech Crunch, they have a number of writers who writes for them regularly and you get something new to read every time you land on these sites.
I’m not saying that you need to hire so many writes, but having a few contributors will obviously help your blog to grow faster. And the best part is that, WordPress provides you extremely easy solution to manage multi-author blog quite easily.
There are a number of WordPress plugins for multi-author blogs which will help you manage the articles submitted by your contributors effectively. In this post, we have collected 5 must have plugins for multi-author blogs which will help you to create a top quality blog and manage your authors with ease.
Plugins to Manage Multi-Author Blogs
User Role Editor
This is one of the must have plugins for every multi-author blogs, this plugin will help you to manage the capabilities of yur users depending on their role or per user basis.
I find this plugin extremely easy and effective in manging my contributors. WordPress offers you easy option to define the role of your users from the settings panel, for that Go to Settings > General.
You can also edit any user and make them contributor or author as per your requirement and once that is done, you can define the capabilities of that user by using this amazing plugin.
This plugin provides you very easy to use interface to manage the authories of a user, you just need to edit teh user and tick the options offered by the plugin to add new capabilities.
Co-Authors Plus
Generally the authors can edit the articles which are published by them and they can’t edit some other authors posts. By using this plugin, you will be able to assign more than one author to a single post and they will be able to edit the posts simultaneously.
This is a very useful functionality for a multi-author blog that will enable you to work on a post like a team to make that post long and detailed.
Edit Flow
Edit Flow is another effective and important WordPress plugin for a multi-author blog that will help you to manage the complete workflow within the WordPress dashboard.
It offers you a threaded commenting system which will help you to have private discussion between the writers and the editors within the dashboard, which is extremely important and helpful to guide your writers accordingly.
As admin, you can create user group and keep them updated with all the details according to their role. You can organize the users according to department and function which will be effective if you have a multi-niche blog and this plugin will help you to create different verticals according to categories.
It comes with an option to have month-on-month calendar, so that you can view and track the productivity effectively.
Email Users
Email Users is another extremely useful plugin for any WordPress site and it is specifically important and useful for the multi-author blogs because it will help you to send internal emails to your authors.
This plugin enables you to send emails to all your registered users from the WordPress dashboard which is quick and easy. You can also send emails to a group of users, for examples if you want to send an email only to the authors you can do that.
You can also enable users to send personal emails to each other which is again a very effective feature because if an editor and writer wants to discuss something, thay can send emails to each other easily.
Adminimize
Adminimize is a must have WordPress plugin for multi-author blog or any other blog where there is an option for the users to register and login. Once a user logs in to your site, they generally gets redirected to the WordPress admin dashboard where they cn view a lot of things which they are not supposed to see.
With this plugin, you can clean up the admin area and have a less cluttered interface. With the help of this plugin, you can hide admin items based on user role.
So, if something is not required for a contributor to have acces in teh admin dashboard, you cn hide that item from the dashboard for the contributor. And you can conrol the admin for each user type according to the requirement based on their role.
Final Word All the above mentioned plugins are free to use and you can download those from the WordPress plugin repository. I’m sure sure these WordPress plugin for multi-author blogs will help you to manage your authors and you blog effectively. From defining authorities to maneging roles and the dashbord view, the plugins mentioned in this list are capable to doing everything which is required by a multi-author blog.
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