The Best WordPress Multi-author Management Plugins

In this article, I’ll cover some of the best WordPress multi-author management plugins. Before we dig into the most popular options available, let’s first look at some of the key features we’d expect to see in a good multi-author management plugin.

The Key to Managing a Multi-author Site

If you decide to build a multi-author blog or website, you may wish to consider the following features. The associated plugins mentioned below will be described in further detail in the next section of this article.

Hiding the WordPress Dashboard

Firstly, you don’t want every WordPress role to have control of your admin area. You should hide this from user roles such as Contributors and Authors where it’s not needed. This can also help make things simpler for your authors.

Use: WP User FrontEnd plugin

Managing Submitted Posts

When managing multiple authors, providing a frontend form via template tag or a shortcode that can enable visitors to submit posts and upload images is an important feature.

Use: User Submitted Post plugin

Author Profile and Bio

Authors usually want their content to be published on a website to help with recognition and to boost their author profile, showcasing their contributions to other professionals. So, the author profile and bio should look attractive, but simple enough to grab attention of the readers.

Use: Author Avatars plugin

Email Multiple Users

An editor can get frustrated with the time spent emailing multiple users when coordinating a busy schedule. A plugin that can make the task easier to email multiple users at a time is certainly another valuable option.

Use: Email Users plugin

In-progress Content

Looking for incomplete posts individually or trying to remember what to do with an incomplete or partially complete document can be tiresome. Managing the editorial workflow can make everything simpler, such as marking incomplete posts with notes or auto detecting empty posts.

Use: Content Progress plugin

User Extended (Cimy User Extra Fields)

The registration page comes with a predefined workflow and standard fields. Eliminate some of the unwanted fields and allow other important fields to be added. This helps give the registration page personal touch.

Use: Cimy User Extra Fields plugin

Notes about Users and Authors

Adding notes in the form of a text area around the profile of each user in the dashboard is a useful feature. Don’t worry, this is not visible to others, only Administrators have access to the notes.

Use: User Notes plugin

WordPress Multi-author Management Plugins

User Submitted Posts

Active Installs: 20,000+

User Submitted Posts is a plugin that lets you easily create frontend form to enable visitors to submit posts and upload images via a template tag or shortcode.

Some of the main features include:

• Allowing visitors to submit posts from anywhere on your site
• Setting submitted images as featured images
• Including input validation and customizable captcha and hidden field to stop spam
• Post submissions may include title, tags, category, author, url, post etc.
• WP’s built-in rich text editor for post content
• Redirecting a user to anywhere or to return to a current page after a successful post submission
• HTML5 submission form with streamlined CSS styles
• Use your own custom form template and stylesheet

User Notes

Active Installs: 300+

The User Notes plugin allows you to keep private notes about users that only Administrators can see. It adds a text area to the profile of each user in the dashboard so that Administrators can maintain private notes. Also importantly, the notes are visible to only Administrators.

WP User Frontend

Active Installs: 10,000+

Through the WP User Frontend plugin the user can easily create new posts and edit their profile from the site frontend, without needing to enter the backend admin dashboard.

Features include:

• The user can create a new post from the frontend
• The user can edit post also from the frontend
• They can view their page in the frontend custom dashboard
• Edit profile from the frontend
• Administrator can restrict any user level on accessing the WordPress backend
• Uploading attachments from the frontend
• Uploading post featured image
• Managing users from the frontend would be possible for administrators

Content Progress

Active Installs: 300+

Content Progress is a plugin to manage the editorial work flow. Here are some of the features:

• Adds icons to the content listings, such as Posts, Pages, and custom post types indicating what you need
• Auto-detects empty posts or documents with less text
• Flag any document if it’s incomplete or needs review
• Creating custom content flags, for example i.e “Add Video”, “Needs formatting”
• Adding notes to the post for making communication between groups easier

Cimmy User Extra Fields

Active Installs: 20,000+

The Cimmy User Extra Fields plugin adds more useful fields to your registration page. You can also add various options to the registration page, including a picture and URL. You can also hide some certain fields if you wish.

Email Users

Active Installs: 10,000+

The Email Users plugin allows the site editors to send an email to the registered site users.

Adminimize

Active Installs: 100,000+

Adminize is an amazing plugin to remove some items from the dashboard for non-admin users. If you’re an admin, you often want to hide certain items in the dashboard to prevent contributors and authors from viewing it.

Capability Manager Enhanced

Active Installs: 30,000+

Not to be confused with the WordPress rules and capabilities, the Capability Manager Enhanced plugin helps you manage the roles (such as Subscriber, Author, Contributor, Editor and Admin) with ease.

Here are the main features:

• Add new roles
• View or change the role capabilities
• Easily copy the existing roles into new ones
• Add new capabilities to existing roles

Restrict Author Posting

Active Installs: 2,000+

The Restrict Author Posting plugin will allow the Admin to restrict a specific category to a user profile. This makes it easier for the author or editor to post only in specific categories.

Revisionary

Active Installs: 4,000+

The Revisionary plugin moderates the editing of published content. The revision can be published immediately or scheduled following consent by an editor. It also gives contributors an ability to submit revisions to their own published content.

Author Avatars List

Active Installs: 10,000+

The Author Avatars List plugin makes it easy to display lists of user avatars on your multi-user blog or website. You can use widgets or shortcodes to display a list of user avatars. A TinyMCE editor plugin comes in addition with this plugin that allows inserting shortcodes easily.

Here’s a great list of 11 of the Best WordPress Author Bio Plugins by Sally Wood if you’re after even more options.

Summary

In this article I’ve covered some of the best multi-author management plugins available for WordPress and how they can help you to better manage your multi-author website. Do you have any others you wish to share?