[Image Credit - Hongkiat ]
Some of the most successful blogs that we see on Technorati Top 100 blogs are multi-authored blogs and most of them are powered by WordPress. Most of you can imagine that if running a successful single author blog can be a daunting task then how difficult it will be to manage a blog that has multiple authors. Be it advertising, blog metrics or logging activity there are various factors that a webmaster has to look into and with help of these plugins, it’ll only become easier -
Must Install Plugins for Multi-Author Blogs
1. 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 etc.
2. 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 plugin is created with a components-based system — you only have to use the features you want. 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.
3. Blog Metrics – This plugin displays number of posts per month, average number of words per post and various other metrics in the dashboard. The reports are generated of overall blog statistics and is extremely useful in multi-author blogs as the reports are generated for individual authors as well.
4. 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).
5. Author Exposed – Author Exposed is a simple WordPress plugin that allows your visitors easy and elegant way to see more details about the post author. This plugin pulls the author’s details from the profile and is linked to a hidden layer (div). By clicking on the author link the layer pop’s up with author info gathered from the profile page, plus gravatar photo, if author email is assigned with one.
6. Quick Notes On 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/modify them. By default, Authors and higher can write, and every registered user can read. Great Add-on for true collaboration.
7. BuddyPress – BuddyPress makes the whole WordPress as a social networking site. It literally adds Facebook like features in a WordPress install. It’s a great plugin for a blog with multiple authors.
8. WordPress to 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.
9. Future Calendar – It 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 (although it doesn’t check the edit timestamp box to avoid accidental changes).
10. 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.
11. Post by Author – 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.
