Blogging is a highly individual form of self-expression. . . To the right? While many see blogging as something like My Own Private Xanga, there are many legitimate reasons to open your blog to more than one author. Maybe you’re part of a group of author-illustrators and you all want to pool your reach and capitalize on each other’s fan bases. Maybe your family is really into the idea of blogging together. Maybe you’re just tired of being responsible for every single post! Whatever the reason, sharing the blogging load requires setting up a dedicated group blog — not just sharing your password with all your friends.
WordPress is an ideal platform for a collaborative blog, as it already includes helpful features It supports multiple authors right out of the box. If you’re wondering if the more the merrier applies to blogging, here’s how to get started.
Reading: How to create a group blog
Invite New Users
As the blog’s founder, you have permission to invite new 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 a few minutes. From there, they can add their display name for posts, add biographical information, and set up a display picture. WordPress uses Gravatar to display author images. So if the author has previously assigned a globally recognized avatar to their email address, they follow it here too.
One important thing to note is that if you are a user, assign give them a “role” from a drop-down menu. There are five different roles that you can assign to a new WordPress user:
- Subscriber: can read the site and leave comments.
- Contributor: can create their own posts and edit but cannot publish.
- Author: can create, edit and publish 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. Can moderate comments, manage categories, manage tags, manage links and upload media files.
- Administrator: full access to the blog; can even edit and rewrite the blog’s code. You have complete control over adding – or deleting – 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 given to people who you not only trust but also understand code to avoid accidentally deleting something. You probably want to assign author and editor positions to your fellow bloggers.
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You can always navigate to Users → All Users to see all users’ role, username and post count at a glance.
Publishing tools
Having an admin (yourself) and a few editors and writers on your group blog means that multiple people have permission to participate in the same posts. So how do you know who’s working on what? This is where communication becomes key.
First, you can take advantage of Post Locking, a WordPress built-in feature that allows only one person to edit and view a blog post at a time Edit Post.
If you later find yourself in a post that you know was edited by another blogger and you want to see what changed, you can use WordPress’ revision feature. If a post has been edited more than once, you can scroll under the edit area to see a list of edits.
Then you can click on any revision to see a comparison between how it looked before and after the revision (although , like in this example, it was just empty before)!
But how can you avoid editing confusion in the first place? There are two handy plugins that I recommend. The first is Dashboard Notes, a simple tool that lets you use the WordPress dashboard like a big sticky note bulletin board. Any user can add a note to the dashboard of what they are currently working on, regardless of their role on the site.
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Another helper is the editorial calendar. Once you install this plugin, it creates a calendar page under Dashboard → Posts in the WordPress edit area. From there, you can create draft posts or drag and drop existing draft posts to schedule when to write and publish.Since everyone can see this, users can collaborate on editorial calendar development.
Show Authors
Now that everything is running smoothly behind the scenes, it’s time to help you and your collaborators to shine. There are a few different features you can add to WordPress to make it clear to your readers who wrote what.
For an overview of all bloggers on a website, you can install WP Author widget to display each one , contributing to a site (regardless of role), in a sidebar or widget area. It shows the authors’ display names and Gravatar images with some customization options on your part. There are many plugins that provide this functionality, but I particularly recommend this one since the WordPress team co-authored it.
Speaking of co-authors, there can be times when multiple contributors are collaborating on the same post, and you will want to credit both (or all). WordPress doesn’t support multiple authors by default, but you can add this functionality with Co-Authors Plus. It provides a drag-and-drop interface below the editing window that allows you to add multiple authors.
You should also make sure that authors are prominent in the comments section so that even if they are not blog admins, they can interact with comments to their own work with a certain (visual) authority. I’m a fan of the Disqus comment system, a free add-on for WordPress that allows you to designate specific people as official moderators, with visual flair to identify them in the comments section that way.
The Group blogging can take some extra work at first, but it also comes with its own unique rewards. Collaborative blogs are a great way to share your knowledge and showcase a variety of viewpoints in just one place. If you’ve enjoyed blogging as an individual in the past, just think what you could accomplish with a team of like-minded writers.
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