Once you have more than one person involved in anything, you increase potential complications automatically.
It’s no different with a WordPress site.
Once you have more than one author on a site, the need for more organization or more functionality becomes apparent quickly.
Below we have 10 multi-author plugins that can help with the challenges that arise when there’s more than one writer in the kitchen.
1. Editorial Calendar | DOWNLOAD
The Editorial Calendar plugin is very handy for multI-author sites. It gives you a clear calendar-view look at what posts are coming up. You can not only schedule posts from the calendar and move them around as you like, you can also write a draft from the calendar.
The calendar automatically updates if the post itself has been updated. So, for example, if you schedule a post to be published on Thursday the 3rd but then as you’re editing the post you change it to Monday the 7th when you look at the calendar again you will see that it has been moved there too.
2. Edit Flow | DOWNLOAD
The Edit Flow plugin has a calendar function like the Editorial Calendar above does. But the Edit Flow plugin has something else very valuable – the ability to set up different stages for a post to move through.
For example, say you have an editor and writers under the editor. You can have a first draft go to the editor for a “review stage,” and then if it’s approved, it can be moved to a “second draft stage” or a “clean up” stage. Then you might go to another “2nd review stage” after that. And if that’s approved, maybe it will go to an “SEO stage,” etc.
You can also move the draft back to a previous stage if something else needs to be done.
3. Co-Authors Plus | DOWNLOAD
If more than one person writes a post, there’s no out-of-box way to give credit to both authors in WordPress.
This plugin solves that problem. It lets you give credit to more than one author on a single post.
4. Post Status Notifier Lite | DOWNLOAD
If you have a number of authors on a site (or maybe even a relative few), then there’s a good chance that there will be some hierarchy in place. You’re likely to have editors or even simply a system with writers checking each other’s work.
This plugin helps with that. It sends notices about a post to people who need to be notified.
For example, if posts need to be submitted to an editor before publication, then this plugin can notify the editor.
Likewise, if the editor publishes a post written by someone else, then this plugin can notify the author that the post has been published.
5. Author Chat | DOWNLOAD
Once you get more than one person involved in anything, then communication becomes key, of course.
It’s no different with a multi-author site.
This plugin lets members of your site chat with each other right on the site. Instead of a lot of back and forth emails, or spilling into people’s personal Skype or Gmail accounts, this lets you keep things related to the site right on the site.
In addition, the chats are stored in your database. You also have the ability to choose how long they should be stored.
6. Author Avatars | DOWNLOAD
This plugin lets you set up a section with the avatars from all your writers on one page. You can include usernames and bios if you like.
You have the ability the choose the size of the avatars. You can also arrange them into groups.
This plugin comes with a convenient widget that lets you easily do all this in the sidebar too.
7. Molongui Authorship | DOWNLOAD
This plugin lets you give credit to writers by showing their information in a clean box in the post.
Of course, many themes already do that, but what makes this plugin different is that it lets you do that for people who aren’t even registered users on your site.
So, for example, if you have guest posts but you don’t want those people registered, or you have so many that you have some other system set up where they submit their work through a special system that doesn’t require them to register, then this plugin lets you still give them credit.
Writers can include both bio info and social media links.
8. Author and Post Static Widgets | DOWNLOAD
This plugin lets you post statistics for individual authors right on the public version of the site.
For example, you can show an author’s most popular posts and how many times each has been viewed. You can show an author’s total post count, the categories he/she has posted in, and the tags that were used.
This plugin also lets you post site-wide statistics such as a list of the most popular authors and a list of the most popular posts and how often each was viewed.
9. Good Writer Checkify | DOWNLOAD
This plugin lets you set up a checklist for writers to follow on the Edit screen (which is different from the next plugin on the list).
For example, let’s say you want to remind writers to put in a featured image or to SEO the post with relevant keywords.
Or maybe you want to remind him/her to style the post a certain way or to do other things related to the post, such as contact anyone who was mentioned in it.
So this is very handy for multi-author sites, but it’s also useful to simply remind yourself of certain things.
10. Cleverness To-Do List | DOWNLOAD
This plugin lets you set up to-do lists for members of your team in the backend. You can then assign these different tasks to different members.
This is different from the plugin above in that it resides in the admin area (not on the edit page), and the tasks are ever-changing. As mentioned, the tasks are (or can be) assigned to different members.
Something else that makes this different is that you get a full WYSIWYG edit for the tasks, so it can include complex instructions and even images and videos.
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