40 WordPress Plugins to Manage Multi-Author Blogs Effectively

Updated on July 2nd, 2018 by Quertime Team in WordPress

One of the great ways to expand your blog is to get co-authors and guest authors producing fresh contents to attract different types of audiences. This trend has been growing rapidly in the blogging industry. Many one-man blogs have turned into multi-author blogs as it’s getting hard for a single author to keep up with the fresh content especially when the audience grows. In many cases, bloggers need to deliver more than one quality blog post everyday to satisfy their increasingly demanding audience. And that’s where co-authors and guest bloggers come in to reduce the workload.

Assuming the part of writers recruitment is being taken care of, the next big challenge will be multi-author management. Apparently it’s no easy task, you have to spend lots of time making sure the authors write quality content and post on time, giving them appropriate permission, and so much more. Fortunately there are lots of WordPress plugins out there helping you to manage your co-authors and guest authors.

Now if you think that it’s time to turn your blog into a multi-author blog, here are 40 excellent WordPress plugins you can use to manage your multi-author blog effectively!

Plugins for Blog Post Management

Editorial Calendar
The editorial calendar gives you an overview of your blog and when each post will be published. You can drag and drop to move posts, edit posts right in the calendar, and manage your entire blog.

Future Posts Calendar: Plugin Official Website
Future Posts Calendar adds a simple month-by-month calendar that shows all the months you have future posts for (and the current month no matter what), it highlights the days you have posts for, and as an added bonus if you click a day, the Post Timestamp boxes change to that day, month and year. The plugin also includes a widget so you can show users what upcoming posts you have on your website.

WP-REPORTPOST
This is a simple but powerful plugin to help your website keeping clean and simple. It allows visitors to report posts and pages for broken links, misleading and abusive contents, copyrights infringements, etc.
Similar Plugin: WP Report Posts

Pre-Publish Reminders
This plugin displays a configurable list of reminders on the post administration screen. Each reminder has a checkbox that you can check to mark that you’ve completed that item. The item will be dimmed when the checkbox is checked and undimmed when unchecked. Use this feature to make sure that you’ve completed everything that you should have.
Similar Plugin: Genki Pre-Publish Reminder

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.
Similar Plugin: Draft Notifier

Plugins for Multi Authors Management

User Role Editor
With User Role Editor WordPress plugin you can change user role (except Administrator) capabilities easy, with a few clicks. Just turn on check boxes of capabilities you wish to add to the selected role and click “Update” button to save your changes.

Role Scoper: Plugin Official Website
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.

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.

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. In this case, some restrictions apply to this users, as them can only set/unset the capabilities they have.
Similar Plugin: Members

WP Hide Dashboard
This plugin removes the Dashboard menu, the Personal Options section and the Help link on the Profile page, hides the Dashboard links in the admin bar menu (if activated), and prevents Dashboard access to users assigned to the Subscriber role. It’s useful if you allow your subscribers to edit their own profiles, but don’t want them wandering around your WordPress admin section.
Similar Plugin: IWG Hide Dashboard

Co-Authors Plus
This plugin allows multiple authors to be assigned to a Post, Pages, or Custom Post Types 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).
Similar Plugin: Co-Authors

Audit Trail: Plugin Official Website
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.

WordPress Gravatar Plugin for Multiple Authors
A WordPress plugin that provides multi users to show their respective gravatars on their authored posts.

Draft Control
The WordPress Plugin “Draft Control” allows users above level 5 to view drafts in a nice row paging system.

WP-Group-Restriction
WP-Group-Restriction is a WordPress plugin that enhances the current user role feature, by allowing administrators to manage access to content (i.e., pages). Currently, it supports assigning users and pages to existing groups, and enables page filtering in the front-office (depending on the current user).

Plugins to Manage Author Profiles

User Photo
User Photo allows users 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.

Post Avatar
This plugin simplifies including a picture when writing posts by allowing the user to choose from a predefined list of images. The image can be automatically shown on the page or output customized with the use of a template tag in themes.

Authors Widget
Authors Widget shows the list or cloud of the authors, with the number of posts, link to RSS feed next to their name, avatar. It is useful in a multi-author blog, where you want to have the list in the sidemenu.

Highlight Author Comments
Highlight Author Comments automatically displays comments made by a post’s author in a distinctive style with no need to edit your template files, etc. All you do is provide a snippet or two of CSS styling to be applied to author posts.
Similar Plugin: Simple Author Highlighter

Post Author
Post Author adds the author and date at the top or bottom of the content on posts, on pages and on categories (optionally along with last modified date and author), with a fully custom per-post / per-page hide option. It is especially useful for multi-author sites and blogs.

Author Exposed: Plugin Official Website
This plugin does the same thing as the the_author tag, displays the author name, only this time it’s linked to hidden layer (div). By clicking on the author link the hidden layer(div) pop’s up with author info gathered from the profile page, plus gravatar photo (if author email is assigned with one).

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.

Get Author Profile
Get Author Profile is a pretty basic WordPress plugin that lets you manually access an author’s profile. The main purpose is to let you provide author information outside the loop, such as for a sidebar intro of the blog owner or to list contributors to your blog.

Userextra
This plugin adds the ability to associate extra information to users and provides Category access controls.

Plugins to Communicate Effectively

Email Users
A plugin for wordpress which allows you to send an email to the registered blog users. Users can send personal emails to each other. Power users can email groups of users and even notify group of users of posts.
Similar Plugin: Send Private Email plugin and Private Messages For WordPress

cbnet Multi Author Comment Notification
This plugin lets all the authors be notified via email about what comments are being posted in their fellow author’s blogs.

Admin Msg Board
Admin Msg Board is a plugin for WordPress that will add a messaging system in your WordPress admin area. This works for weblogs that are written by more than one blogger, so they can communicate with each other, without leaving the WP system.

Quick Notes on the WP Dashboard
If you blog with multiple persons, you can leave a message for the others. In the plugin file, you can determine what capabilities a user must have to read the notes, and what capabilities he must have to write or modify them. By default, Authors and higher can write, and every registered user can read.

Plugin for Revenue Sharing

Author Advertising Plugin
This plugin allows blog admins to create a revenue sharing program utilising 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.

AdSense Revenue Sharing
AdSense Revenue Sharing is a WordPress plugin which allows you to easy display ads in your posts by using a quicktag and share your adSense impressions with your friends and co-authors.

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 preallocated by the blog administrator, authors will be able to display various forms of advertisements in addition to accepting Paypal donations.