A couple of years ago, the WordPress as CMS was questioned, alleging its roots as a blogging platform. The answer to the question has pretty much become public, as WordPress now serves plenty of media portals, publishing houses, corporate communication portal and others.

WordPress widely acclaimed for its intuitive and feature rich interface has limitation in managing editorial teams effectively. Content companies and publishers whose very requirement is to implement a proper and well balanced editorial workflow including pitching, assigning writers, editing and paying contributors etc are finding it very hard to balance administrative and editorial tasks.

Being a WordPress publisher, I have been handling a team of writers, copy editors and freelancers for almost a decade now. All through this time, I have always felt the need of a tool that can automate all my administrative tasks so that I can focus on producing top notch content. This inquisition led me to look for various ways to refine my content production. I have picked up few of the WordPress plugins that have helped me greatly in bringing order and efficiency.

1. ContentCloud

2. Newsflow

The Newsflow plugin earlier known by the name Hypernews is a widely used plugin specializing in fetching syndicated RSS feeds from multiple sources and publishing them on the WordPress based website successfully. The Newsflow plugin boasts of a very fast and user friendly interface allowing fetching of individual feeds allowing the administrator to manually fetch and publish selected feeds on the website. Combined with the easy interface and flexibility of choosing the publication of desired feeds, the Newsflow plugin allows administrators to read and mark items from the fetched feeds while keeping track of read items by de-marking them allowing administrator to make a note on each item row. Editing of published feeds fetched by the Newsflow plugin is embedded into the plugin and is carried out by clicking on the post type links at each item row. Although the Newsflow plugin was primarily developed in Swedish language, the plugin works well for most languages including English. The plugin allows the feeds to be posted as a draft on any specific page or any custom post. What I find most suitable about the Newsflow plugin is that the Newsflow plugin has no issues working for websites placed over a network and works just as well for both with and without network installations with equal success.

3. Approval Workflow

Approval Workflow plugin used to improve the smoothness of the workflow progress of multiple authored websites based on the WordPress publishing platform. The plugin enhances the workflow mechanism by verifying users for administrative as well publishing rights for their articles or posts. According to me, Approval Workflow is an intelligently developed plugin that searches for a user with publishing rights once any post is submitted by an author on the platform work desk. While reaching out to the publisher the plugin not only improves efficiency but also cuts out any time discrepancies in submission and publication. What I liked in this plugin is, if any user does not have publishing rights, the plugin automatically sends email to users with publishing rights informing them and keeping them in the loop for each submission and publication. The Approval Workflow plugin uses a box in the post edit screen when a user does not have publish permissions for that post type enabling administrators to set a WordPress role as the approver. The plugin is an intrinsic part of the multiple authored websites since it not only helps in easing out the workflow of multiple authored websites but works equally well on WordPress multisite.

4. Simple History

Simple History is a well developed WordPress plugin that allows the administering team to view all the previous changes incorporated by any of the users on the platform. The plug-in gives a complete overview on the recent changes including creation of new posts or pages, uploading of any attachment or files and approval of any comment by any user. Simply speaking, the plugin doubles up as a blog watchdog keeping a close eye on the blog log history including audit log and version history apart from keeping track of all updates initiated by the pool of users. For the administrators on the move or busy with traveling and unable to check the plug-in online, the simple history plug-in offers a unique solution enabling syndication of RSS feeds of the changes which can be routed to any hand held devices or smart phone tablets. Simple history plug-in is not a spying tool but is in fact a boom for multiple authored websites having a multiple layer of editors entrusted with the responsibility of handling users, data and publishing content. Simple history plug-in is so far available in for languages namely English, German, Simplified Chinese and Swedish but more language compatibility tools are being developed owing to the huge success of the plug-in in its intrinsic format.

5. Document Repository

Document Repository is an advanced WordPress plug-in that enables any WordPress powered website to be turned into a revision document repository. The plug-in not only allows stand alone document revision but also enables document revision via permalink independent of the version of the WordPress platform. I noticed that although Document repository plug-in has been designed for documents in the WordPress platform based as content management system or CMS but it works equally well with stand alone single websites based on WordPress. The powerful document repository plug-in allows cross domain implementation via JSON and offers additional Optional custom taxonomies and optional plug-ins. For document revisions the plug-in creates a new document revision post while download via permalink allows direct download the current version of the document. Apart from preparing document revisions available for download, the plug-in also embedded with a number of custom roles allows flexibility options to permit or restrict contributors, authors as well as editors to access organizational role specific documents. Therefore by efficiently using all the above stated plugins, I have not only explored WordPress but have also managed to bring the editorial management of my WordPress site to a higher level. Hope they prove equally beneficial to you.

About The Author: Alia is a writer/blogger. She is a big fan of WordPress CMS, and advises different client with WordPress themes.