Multi Author blogs are the latest fad. Every other blog that pops up with strong ambitions these days is a multi author blog or it employs freelance writers. Setting up a powerful multi author blog doesn’t need just a new user profile, you got to add some fine tunings for it to stand out from the crowd. Fortunately, Wordpress as a blogging platform, can be customized and extended to a great extent. Yes, you got it right – with plugins. If you are planning to invite new authors to your blog or already have one and wish to take it to a next level, we have a list of 5 Wordpress plugins that you should really bring into use.

Insights

The Insights plugin for wordpress lets you speedily add links from various sources and different kinds of media right from the post editor. Using a dynamic Ajax interface, you can quickly search and add links to previously written blog posts, helping it with inter-linking. Moreover, while you right a post, you can search and look if some other author has previously written about it or if there are related sources on your own blog that you can link to. Apart from this, you can also add flickr images, youtube videos, links to wikipedia, maps and a lot more. Download the Insights plugin ^[1]

Adsense Revenue Sharing

^[2] If you use Adsense on your blog, it makes sense to share the profits with your co-authors, if you are not paying them directly. AdSense Revenue Sharing is a wordpress plugin which allows you to easy display ads in your posts by using a quicktag and share your adsense impressions with your friends and co-authors. Download Adsense Revenue Sharing plugin ^[3]

Sources:

Another alternative to this plugin is the Author Advertising plugin ^[4] which does the same task, although you can add banners and images too. If you want something that works on its own, Rotatee ^[5] is nice content rotating script that you can install on your server and use it to rotate anything from text to videos on your website.

Private Email

The Private Email wordpress plugin works as a central point from where you can contact all your blog authors, either all at once, or selectively. It is useful when you have to make important announcements or just need to send a quick follow up to a writer. To avoid abuse of its functionality, only users with the administrator role can send emails. Download Private Email plugin ^[6]

Sources:

Another plugin to this job is Email Users ^[7]. Although, the mentioned plugins solve a good deal of communication hassles, setting up a private Yammer ^[8] network for your blog can take it to that extra mile.

Manage Roles

User levels, aka roles define what all functions a user can perform. Wordpress has a defined set of rules. But what if you want to change them, customize them for a particular user and grant him more or less permissions? The Manage Roles Plugin lets you do so. Download Manage Roles plugin ^[9]

Author Exposed

Author Exposed is a simple Wordpress plugin that allows your visitors an easy and elegant way to see more details about the post author. You’ll have to add a bit of php between the loop in your template where you want it to appear. When the user clicks the link, an elegant in-screen box pops up with author information. Download Author Exposed plugin ^[10]

Sources:

Although the plugin works good, if you want to achieve a similar result by coding it yourself, you can follow an easy guide here, How to create an author information box ^[11].

What’s your say?

And that’s all! Let us know what you use for managing users on your blog, tumble in the comments!