WordPress is a very well established platform. Whether it be content management systems and/or blogging platforms, it is quite clear that WordPress leads the race by a mile. There is no other CMS that can match up to WordPress in terms of popularity and ease of usage, with the added advantage of its versatility and feature rich interface.
WordPress admirably has become the platform of choice for millions, but it sure is accompanied by some limitations, when it comes to managing a proper editorial team. This is due to the fact that WordPress was initially released as a simple blogging tool for small time bloggers or small site developers. To manage a full fledged teams, content companies were turning towards spreadsheets or emails. Due to this majority of their time was spread on administrative tasks rather than enriching their content.
Being a WordPress publisher myself, I too have felt the need of a tool that can automate my administrative work. A tool that can work wonders for me by helping me focus on my content and divert my attention from administrative tasks. I have explored few of the WordPress plugins that have actually helped me to produce quality content without diverting my attention to other issues.
1. ContentCloud
ContentCloud is a WordPress plugin released by Betaout This plugin provides a SaaS (System as a Software) platform with a highly impressive and distinguished look. You can readily use this plugin without opening an account with their online demo which is fully functional.
With ContentCloud you would explore a fully featured and customized editorial workflow. This plugin empowers the publisher or a managing editor to have complete control over content production process along with the power to manage and share resources across multiple websites. ContentCloud acts as a tool that automates all your administrative work and makes the editors more productive and highly efficient, producing top notch content.
ContentCloud has a very intuitive and user friendly interface that you would hate to leave. Also the helpdesk is prompt to answer any of your queries. The only suggestion to the ContentCloud team would be to come up with some video tutorials for a better understanding to the new comers.
Overall ContentCloud is definitely amongst the best solutions for any serious WordPress editorial team.
2. User Role Editor
User Role Editor enables users to change role (except for the Administrator) capabilities easily. By activating check boxes of capabilities, a user adds the chosen role and by clicking on the ‘revised’ option, can save their desired changes. Adding new responsibilities and customizing them with qualifications according to the user’s needs can be done easily from scratch. Frivolous self-appointed roles can be removed if there is a lack of qualified users to whom such role could have been assigned. Responsibilities assigned to new users by default can be changed too. Individual roles could be assigned on the basis of specific user capabilities. Users can insert new qualifications and remove unnecessary ones that might have been left back from uninstalled Plugins. Multiple-site support is also provided that enables it to be compatible with the latest 3.3 WordPress multiple-website version. As a matter of fact, this plugin works by for every blog including multiple-website networks and locally functional blogs. To revise chosen responsibilities globally for multiple networks, users should activate the ‘Apply to all Websites’ check-box. In summation User Role Editor provided Super-administration privileges to users opting for WordPress multiple-website Plugins.
3. Ice Visual Revisions
Ice Visual Revisions plugin has been especially created for the purpose of distinguishing the changes made in a particular text. It allows you to visually differentiate the edited content, through coloring the data that has been added or deleted from a text and also about who has made what changes. This also features the time when the text has been edited becoming visible during the application of this plugin.
4. Role Scoper
Role scoper is a widely used WordPress plug-in applied in multiple authored websites, offering access controlling solutions to the website making it similar to a CMS platform. The functionality of the role scoper plug-in makes sure that core user permissions are not altered in any way and offers customized permissions for various pages, posts and allows assigning content specific roles to various authors and users. Users can be upgraded or downgraded to read respective posts or categories as desired. Removing the role scoper plug-in or deactivation makes sure that default functionality of all users gets resorted. Such flexibility in user permissions for various posts makes sure that certain users are restricted to get content specific roles while others can be bypassed to get a more proactive customized assigned role without altering basic user permissions.
5. Document Repository
Document Repository plugin is designed to render a central review repository for posts and documents in WordPress network, which is being used as a CMS. But it can also be used in any single WP blogs/sites and is compatible to cross domain implementation through JSON. There are several features of Document Repository, which includes Download via Permalink, Document revisions, Version independence, Revision download via permalink, Optional custom roles, Optional custom taxonomies, and Optional extras. All these features help the users in managing the various linking activities required while managing different posts or pages in WP.
These plugins can help you to a great extent in making your editorial team truly agile, as they have assisted me admissibly. Hope theses plugins prove to be an answer to at least some of your WordPress queries.
About The Author: Alyssa is a writer/blogger. She is a big fan of WordPress CMS, and advises different client with WordPress themes.
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