8 Must Have WordPress Plugins For Multi Author Blogs

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There are numerous blogs like Mashable, Techcrunch, FamousBloggers and Shoutmeloud that run by a team of authors/writers. This is not only a great way to expand your blog’s content, but it is a great way to attract new readers/bloggers & build relationship with them. While this may sound nice but managing a multi author blog is no easy task. Ask Hesham Zebdia, how hard it is to manage a multi author blog, setting users permission, sending emails, controlling and so much more.

All those blogs have one thing in common, they are running on WordPress CMS and WordPress allows us to manage a multi-author blog efficiently with the help of these fantastic plugins.

In this post I will be sharing a list of 8 simple plugins that will help you to manage a multi authors blog more efficiently.

1. Better Author Bio

Author box isn’t just for mutli author blogs, it can be used on all type of blogs even on one man blogs. Author bio box is something that every blogger should use, as it helps to further connects with your readers.

This plugin adds an author bio box in every post automatically. You can choose where you want to show it. You can add links of your Blog, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Facebook profiles on the bio. Add it automatically or manually with shortcode [author_bio].

2. WP Status Notifier

It is a must have plugin for the multi author blogs. WP Status Notifier will send a notification to given email address(es) of posts pending review by contributors. It can also optionally notify the contributors when their post is accepted or rejected. The plugin will add an options page in the WordPress administration area where you can set one or more email addresses to notified of posts pending review.

3. Latest Contributors

This plugin is created by my friend, Hesham. The recent contributors plugin will add a new widget in your WordPress widget page, it will allow you to list the recent contributors pictures automatically, it will grab images from gravatar.com based on their emails, and will use their profile url for the link.

Latest Contributors plugin has no options panel, if you need to change number of contributors displayed on the widget, then you must edit the wp_latest_contributors.php file, find the number “36” and change it to preferred number of images you would like to display.

4. Allow REL= and HTML in Author Bios

This is a non-configurable plugin which enables the use of Rel=”author”, primarily created to enable Google+ author search functionality to display author information in Google search results. Enables use of REL= or anything else in Author bio area (for Google+ search results). Warning: can be used for evil.  Make sure you trust authors.

5. 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.

The foundation of the plugin is its extensive role and capability management system. This is the backbone of all the current features and planned future features.

6. General Notes

Add notes on the “edit post” and “edit page” screens’ sidebars in WordPress 3.0 and up. When used with Peter’s Collaboration E-mails 1.2 and up, the notes are sent along with the e-mails in the collaboration workflow. There is also a general and private notes system on the dashboard.

On the dashboard, there’s also a summary of the most recent notes. By default this shows notes by all people on relevant posts / pages. There is also a general and private notes system.

7. Great Pens

The recent contributors plugin will add a new widget in your WordPress widget page, it will allow you to list the recent contributors pictures automatically, it will grab images from gravatar.com based on their emails, and will use their profile url for the link.

8. User-Photo

Allows a user to associate a profile photo with their account through their “Your Profile” page. Admins may add a user profile photo by accessing the “Edit User” page. 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.

Bonus: Gravity Forms

Gravity forms, know for creating custom contact forms but do you know – you can create an awesome content submission form with the Gravity Forms Plugin. I’m using this plugin for Blokube Blog for accepting guest posts and it works pretty well.

Do you have any recommendations? What are you thoughts on running a multi author blog? Please let us know in the below comments.

Tagged as: contact, famousbloggers, featured, forms, mashable, mutli authors, plugins, shoutmeloud, techcrunch