The State of Multi-Author Blogging with WordPress
FairSoftware’s blog has multiple authors. Our FairBlogs users, by definition, have multiple authors. Adding authors or writers to your blog is a great way to get a head start on all the other bloggers out there.
But I’m not yet satisfied with how WordPress manages multiple authors.
My wishlist:
- Scheduling: I need an easy way to discuss with the other authors and coordinate our calendar of posts so that we know when which post is supposed to go out.
- Review: I need to easily know whether everyone else agrees that my post is good to go, or if it needs some more work.
WordPress Defaults
By default, WordPress doesn’t do a great job at either scheduling or moderating posts. On the post page, you can’t even sort the posts by date of publication. Posts are sorted by date of last edit.
There is not much of an attempt at multi-author support in WordPress, you are supposed to move to WordPress-MU. But that’s overkill for my needs. I don’t need to host hundreds of blogs with as many authors, I just want to run one blog with some friends.
The Power of PlugIns
Luckily, WordPress’s strength lies in the hundreds of plugins that allow you to tailor and tweak your blog to your needs.
So I went to search for plugins that help me with scheduling and administration. But I didn’t find as much as I wanted.
Future Posts: allows you to see a calendar with future posts on them. Yes, it sort of does show you a small calendar in the corner of your screen, but I found it pretty useless. This could be made so much more useful to me.
GT Status: adds a approve/reject button to the post page. On paper, this is exactly what I was looking for. In practice, the functionality seems too limited and usage is confusing. All you get is a “rejected” button, which you may click to have it say “approved”. And then what? It’s close, but not quite the way I’d like it to be. There is no way to set a rule that a post needs approval from several authors before it is published.
Call for Help
Did I miss the plugin that everyone else is using? I spent days reading through descriptions of tens of plugins, searching discussion groups and blogs. I couldn’t find what I’m looking for.
What I should do? Maybe write my own, using what’s already out there to avoid reinventing the wheel. If so, this is the right time for feedback from other potential users.
What features would you like to see, other than the ones I mentioned at the beginning of this post?
I was pointed to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-authors/ as another useful plugin to manage multiple authors, but as its faq says, it's hard to support advanced features because WordPress's API doesn't support much.
Ecommerce Web Design All you get is a “rejected” button, which you may click to have it say “approved”. And then what? It’s close, but not quite the way I’d like it to be. There is no way to set a rule that a post needs approval from several authors before it is published.
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Skoro eto sluchitsya …