25 Awesome Plugins for Multi-Author WordPress Blogs

WordPress is an open source content management system(CMS) and is also today the ultimate platform for commercial blogging. Millions of blogs are powered by WordPress because of its versatility and flexibility. It has thousands of plugins in its repository, an active community and an excellent documentation which makes it very easy for users to start a new blog commercially.

One of wordpress’s excellent feature is the various user levels. By default wordpress has Administrators, Editors, Authors, Contributors and Subscribers with each having their own roles. This features gives the advantage of having multiple authors for the same blog. This is feature is very convenient as now people can hire authors to write for them and give them limited roles and capabilities.

But what if we want to edit roles and capabilities of users? Or add a new user level with specific roles? Or control the posts of different users more efficiently? Or schedule the publishing of posts by different authors? This is a tough job if you have limited resources and an acute shortage of time. In these situations, WordPress, shows its true strength with an array of various plugins to accomplish these tasks easily. No more manual clicks, no more organizing headaches, no more extra coding skills. All you need to do is install plugins that  you require and everything is handled by WordPress.

Advertising

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Author Advertising Plugin

This plugin allows blog admins to create a revenue sharing program utilizing 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.

WordPress Multiple Author Ad management

The plugin is ideal for blogs with multiple authors and acts as an incentive for making quality posts. When the add-on is enabled, users will have full control over the advertisements displayed on their own posts. Using a space pre-allocated by the blog administrator, authors will be able to display various forms of advertisements in addition to accepting Paypal donations.

Communication

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Send Private Email

Send emails to registered users. Simple, powerful and very convenient to use.

cbnet Multi Author Comment Notification

By default WordPress sends notifications of new comments to the author of the post only. If you have a blog where there are 3 authors who writes for this blog then they will get notification of new comments for those post which they have written themselves only.

Multi Authors

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Co-Authors Plus

Allows multiple authors to be assigned to a Post or Page via the search-as-you-type inputs. Co-authored posts appear on a co-author’s posts page and feed. New template tags allow listing of co-authors. Editors and Administrators may assign co-authors to a post. 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).

List Authors Widget

Display a list of authors in your WordPress Sidebar Widgets

Multiple Authors

This plugin provided basic multiple author support. It has been supplanted by better plugins like Co-Authors and Co-Authors Plus. It may be resurrected some day, if those plugins are no longer sufficient.

Top Authors

This plugins allows you to easily sum the most contributing authors on your site. It is highlty customizable, it’s posible to to customize your own HTML output.

Logs

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Audit Trail

Audit 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.

Post Revision Display

Displays post-publication revisions along with differences/changes from current revision on single post views.

Simple History

Simple History shows recent changes made within WordPress, directly on your dashboard or on a separate page. Users of the system can see what articles have been created, modified or deleted, what attachments have been uploaded, modified or deleted, and what plugins that have been activated or deactivated.

Syslog

WPsyslog2 is a global log plugin for WordPress. It keeps track of all system events and log them to syslog. It tracks events such as new posts, new profiles, new users, failed logins, logins, logouts, etc. It also tracks the latest vulnerabilities and alerts if any of them are triggered, becoming very useful when integrated with a log analysis tool, like OSSEC HIDS.

Photos and Avatars

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Author Image

The author image plugin for WordPress lets you easily add author images on your site.

Post Avatar

A WordPress plugin simplifies 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. This plugin is similar to Livejournal userpics.

User Photo

Allows a user to associate a photo with their account and for this photo to be displayed in their posts and comments. Uploaded images are resized to fit the dimensions specified on the options page; a thumbnail image correspondingly is also generated. User photos may be displayed within a post or a comment to help identify the author.

Users and Roles Management:

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Capability Manager

The Capability Manager plugin provides a simple way to manage role capabilities. Using it, you will be able to change the capabilities of any role, add new roles, copy existing roles into new ones, and add new capabilities to existing roles. You can also delegate capabilities management to other users. With the Backup/Restore tool, you can save your Roles and Capabilities before making changes and revert them if something goes wrong.

Members

Members is a plugin that extends your control over your blog. It’s a user, role, and content management plugin that was created to make WordPress a more powerful CMS. It has features like Edit Rolesm New Roles, Content Permissions, Shortcodes etc.

Role Scoper

Role Scoper is a comprehensive access control solution, giving you CMS-like control of reading and editing permissions. Assign restrictions and roles to specific pages, posts or categories.

Reminders

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Draft Notification

This 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.

Genki Pre-publish reminder

Always forget to insert your signature or maybe a category image? Or need a place to store your code where you can conveniently copy and paste into your post? This is what this plugin is for – a handy reminder list on your Post Admin page.

Headache with Pictures

“Headache with Pictures” is a small, but usefull plugin for your dashboard: It offers an area to quickly write down things you’ve got on your mind. If you blog with multiple persons, you can leave a message for the others.

WordPress Admin Notepad

WordPress Admin Notepad is a plugin that allows selected user group to save or view notes as long as they are logged into admin panel. WordPress Admin Notepad automatically creates a show/hide notepad toggle at top right corner (beside log out link) so that admin can save their notes no matter where they are.

Utilities

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Adminimize

Adminimize is a WordPress plugin that lets you hide ‘unnecessary’ items from the WordPress administration menu, submenu and even the ‘Dashboard’, with forwarding to the Manage-page. On top of that, you can also hide post meta controls on the Write page and other areas in the admin-area and Write-page, so as to simplify the editing interface.

Edit Flow

Edit Flow offers a suite of functionality to redefine your editorial workflow within WordPress. The features include Custom Statuses, Editorial Comments, Email Notifications, Usergroup, Calendar, Editorial Metadata etc

Posts by Author Plugin

This 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. Other options have been added since the first release.

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