Blogging is a very individual form of self-expression. . . good? While many may think of blogging as something like My Own Private Xanga, there are many legitimate reasons to consider opening your blog to more than one author. Maybe you’re part of a group of authors and illustrators who all want to combine their reach and benefit from each other’s fan bases. Maybe your family really likes the idea of blogging together. Maybe you’re tired of being responsible for each and every post yourself! Whatever the reason, blogging load sharing requires setting up a specific group blog, not just giving out your password to all your friends.
WordPress is an ideal platform for a collaborative blog as it comes with features that help is multi-author compatible right out of the box. If you’re wondering if “more is merrier” applies to blogging, here’s how to get started.
Inviting new users
As the founder of the blog, you have permission to invite new users. people to join. Hover over the Users button on the left side of the WordPress dashboard and click “Add New”.
The user will receive an invitation in their email inbox within minutes. From there, they can add their display name on posts, add bio information, and set a display image. WordPress uses Gravatar for author display images, so if the author has previously assigned a globally recognized avatar to your email address, it will follow you here as well.
One important thing to note is that when you invite a user, you assign them a “Role” from a dropdown menu. There are five different roles you can assign to a new WordPress user:
- Subscriber – can read the site and leave comments.
- Contributor – can create and edit their own posts , but cannot publish.
- Author: You can create, edit your own posts, and publish your own posts. They can also delete their own posts and upload media files such as images.
- Editor: Can view, edit, publish, and delete any post or page. You can moderate comments, manage categories, manage tags, manage links, and upload media files.
- Administrator: full and complete access to the blog; you can even edit and rewrite the blog code. They have full control over adding or removing anything.
Here’s a great infographic from WPBeginner that visually demonstrates the full scope of what each role allows a user to do. The admin role should only be assigned to people who you not only trust, but are code-savvy enough not to accidentally delete anything. You will most likely want to give your fellow bloggers Author and Editor positions.
At any time, you can navigate to Users → All Users to view the role, username, and number of posts of all at a glance.
Publishing Tools
If you have an admin (yourself), plus a few editors and authors on your group blog, that means multiple people have permission to access the same publications. So how do you know who is working on what? This is where communication becomes key.
First, you can take advantage of Post Blocking, a built-in WordPress feature that allows only one person at a time to edit a blog post and also displays you who are currently editing each post.
Later, if you’re inside a post that you know another blogger has edited and you want to see what got changed, you can use the WordPress Revisions feature. If there is more than one edit to a post, you can scroll below the edit area to see a list of revisions.
You can then click on any revision to see a comparison between how it looked before and after the revision (even if , as in this example, it was just blank before)!
But how do you avoid editing confusion in the first place? There are two useful plugins that I recommend. The first is Dashboard Notes, a simple tool that allows you to use the WordPress Dashboard as a great bulletin board for sticky notes. Any user can add a note to the board about what they are working on, regardless of their role on the site.
Another help is the Editorial Calendar. Once you install this plugin, it creates a Calendar page under Dashboard → Posts in the WordPress editing area. From there, you can create post drafts, or drag and drop existing post drafts, to plan when they should be written and published.Since everyone can see it, users can work together to develop the editorial calendar.
Show Authors
Now that you have everything running smoothly behind the scenes, it’s time to help you and your contributors shine. There are a few different features you can add to WordPress to make it explicitly clear who wrote what to your readers.
To get an at-a-glance list of all the bloggers on a site, you can install the WP Author Widget to display a everyone who contributes to a site (regardless of their role) in any sidebar or widget area. It displays the authors’ display names and Gravatar images, with some customization options on your part. There are many plugins that offer this functionality, but I recommend this one specifically since the WordPress team co-wrote it.
Speaking of co-authors, there may be times when multiple contributors work together on the same post, and you’ll want to credit both (or all). WordPress doesn’t support multiple authors out of the box, but you can add that functionality with Co-Authors Plus. It provides a drag and drop interface below the editing window that allows you to add multiple writers.
You’ll also want to make sure authors are highlighted in the comments section, so even if they’re not admins of the blog, they can interact with comments about your own work with some (visual) authority. I’m a fan of the Disqus comment system, a free WordPress plugin that allows you to designate certain people as official moderators, with a visual twist to help identify them that way in the comments section.
Group blogs can involve a bit of extra work at first, but they also come with their own unique rewards. Collaborative blogs are a great way to share your knowledge with others and showcase a variety of viewpoints in one space. If you’ve enjoyed blogging in the past as an individual, just think what you could achieve with a team of like-minded authors.
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