Being a publisher you need to focus on great many tasks. Then be it writing for a blog or creating an infographic the process could be very tedious. Further when you are churning out a lot of content and managing multiple authors and content contributors the complexity increases further.

For each piece of content it is important for you to rally out the right resources, distribution and promotion of content, absolute feedback mechanism and lots more. The processes become much more disordered when you have to manage your team across multiple locations. To bring uniformity to this process, you may turn to other available alternatives like spreadsheets and emails. Despite all your best efforts you still find yourself struggling to keep your head above water.

WordPress an open source blogging tool helps you tame this chaos to a great extent. You can easily customize your WordPress sites by making use of WordPress plugins. WordPress along with its amazing plugins can help you create an editorial project management strategy. The editorial project management strategy will not only help you to structure your processes but would also automate all your administrative tasks. Below is a list of 10 WordPress plugins that help you in strategizing your WordPress editorial project management.

1. ContentCloud

ContentCloud from Betaout is the most preferred solution for any publisher running WordPress sites. ContentCloud is a plug and play cloud platform that boasts a seamless integration with WordPress. This plugin is loaded with features such as resource sharing, real time activity feed, content templates, custom workflows, robust collaboration and a great UI.

ContentCloud offers a fixed set of user roles namely, editors, authors, guest authors, copy editors and proofreaders. User roles can neither be edited nor can you create any additional user role. Editors can access the Newsroom App while everyone else login to Workbench App. The concept of designing two interfaces for editors and other team members is worth exploring as it helps them all to focus on their work. Workbench App is relatively minimalists as compared to Newsroom App which helps in cutting the training time for the content team.

Betaout comes with an HTML5 App which is fully functional on tablets and Android powered devices.

2. Edit flow

Edit flow is a WordPress plugin which is useful for big blogs like online news publication, periodicals or regulated story publication website. The main challenge faced by any big blogs are usually maintenance issues like editorial activity, systematic workflow control etc. Edit Flow is plugin designed precise for any version of PHP and MySQL database along with WordPress framework itself, and truly it is compatible with all available version of this CMS. This particular plugin I found very helpful because of its offered features like user management, where I can manage all my registered user and group them according to their contribution to my blog. This plugin allows to create groups of extended users according to their department of responsibility like write, editor, reviewer, proof reader etc. This plugin also includes a calendar inside the WordPress administration dashboard that features the published posts according to day and dates. It also provide a story board view for all blog workflow like commenting, posts, edits etc. It keeps a separate database for the editorial metadata and notification which is usually important for every blog publisher and admins. Apart from that it also portrays the story budgets and editors comments to guide the publication process.

3. Content Progress

Content Progress is a WordPress plugin is basically very helpful for a blog managing huge numbers of contents every day. One of my digital review blog had to deals with large numbers of product review every day and that is when I came across this plugin. This plugin actually adds some icons besides the usual WordPress content listing. Those icons refer weather content like page or posts or article is completed or not. Although it cannot determine the actual state of lay out designing process. But it is very helpful to determine whether content is empty or very small. It also allows the moderator to flag any content if necessary. The WordPress processing unit of this plug can easily detect empty content and it automatically mark then as ‘Empty Post’. Not only that, it can also detect whether any article is very small considering to average post length of the blog. The small posts are usually marked as partial post. This plugin do not provide a huge numbers of functionality but definitely does a good job in scanning every posts and content. It simply gives a better interface to communicate between writers group and scan all content posted to the blog with very few mouse clicks.

4. Editorial Guidelines

Editorial Guidelines is a very old but effective plugin developed specially for WordPress blogs or website having multiple editors. This plugin may not run on new latest WordPress framework but it has very large compatibility range. This plugin adds a simple option beside every editor page (posts or page); by click which one can see the editorial guidelines set by the moderator or webmasters. This plugin is meant for helping the editors during their editorial task. It also saves time by offering all editorial rules and regulations at every editorial page. Editors do not have to visit any other page for clarifying their doubts about any issues; they can simple view it from the very editorial page they are on. It also does not redirect the editor to any other document rather opens a new pop-up window for the purpose. At the backend of this plugin it offers customization panel for the moderator to customize the editorial rules and regulation. It can be easily accessed from the moderator dashboard and strictly available to moderator authorization that means no one with authorization less than moderator can be able to edit or change the rules content. So over all this is complete and light weight plugin for any WordPress based publication site.

5. Revisionary

Revisionary is a revision add-on plugin specifically designed for WordPress blog publication. Usual WordPress interface does not allow revision of posts or articles, so this that is why this plugin became so important for any news or publication website or blogs. Whenever any writer publish any news or article to the blog Revisionary does not publish that article to site, rather it creates a revision copy of the content and notifies the moderator and editors of the blog. Then it offers a wide range of controls to revise and edit the blog content. It also allows the reviser to add any kind of feedback comment or editorial message to the writer. Not only editors, but also writers can edit their own posts after submission. Finally when the complete revision is done one can publish the post right away or can be scheduled the publication date. Over all this plugin does not try to overdo anything but definite servers the purpose for which it is designed. It also offers a very user friendly and simple interface so that anyone familiar with basic WordPress interface can be able to handle this without a hassle.

6. Document Repository

Document Repository as the name suggests is an advanced WordPress plugin developed in collaboration with the University of Mary Washington that allows conversion of any WordPress powered website or blog to encapsulate into a successful revision document repository. The eccentric qualities of document repository plugin enables stand alone document revision while offering an option of document revision via permalink that is not related to the version of the WordPress platform making it a multi dimensional tool that is independent of the version of the WordPress publishing platform. Even though the Document repository plugin has been intrinsically modeled 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 all WordPress platforms. One of the most eye catching qualities of the document repository plugin is its wonderful feature offering allowance for cross domain performance via the inbuilt JSON tool with optional convention taxonomies and multiple plugins. For real-time document revisions the document repository plugin allows creation of a new document revision post with downloadable feature of the plugin allowing direct download of the most recent version of the content document. With optional download from preparing document revisions, the plugin embeds multiple custom role plugins enabling all website administrators with innumerable flexible options to allow or block and restrict certain contributing authors as well as editors to access organizational role specific documents. One of the most interesting and user friendly quality of the document repository plugin is its ability to offer complete version independence with the power of offering optional custom taxonomies that enables implementation of custom taxonomies without any specific document post types.

7. Ice Visual Revisions

Ice Visual Revision is one of the pioneer WordPress plugin that embraces the visual medium to differentiate between the content revisions process incorporating into an effective editing plugin to the WordPress visual editor. Ice visual revisions is based on visual dimensions and allows administrators and webmasters to distinguish all changes in the post content on the website demarked in specific colors and user names that not only makes approval of the incorporated changes smooth but also allows for a far efficient editing workflow mechanism process. Ice Visual Revisions plugin is based on the Ice library developed by The New York Times CMS Group and requires WordPress version 3.3 or higher while being totally compatible with versions up to: 3.4.2. The plugin although in its nascent version offers complete support for changing the tracking css classnames with the ‘mce_ice_settings’ filter and a warning when attempting it along with standardize post previews that fix all initial tracking by improving the generated warnings when changing tracking class names.

8. Joget

Joget WordPress plugin is based on the Joget workflow which has been successfully embedded as a plugin for WordPress enabled websites and blogs. In layman’s terminology, the Joget workflow is an open source workflow application builder allowing creation of full-fledged apps with support for data records management offering faster and more consistent completion of manual processes, and with minimal errors. The more intrinsic part of the Joget workflow allows for far greater visual efficiency with adequate drag and drop mechanism allowing a smoother workflow design including form builder, data list builder as well as the user view builder. The installer file of the Joget WordPress plugin is bundled with Java 6, Apache Tomcat 6.0.18 (port 8080) and MySQL 5.0.22 (3307) allowing administrators to choose their installation bundle according to the platform base. Joget Workflow essentially involves a three step cycle namely design, configure and execute. Keeping up with its nature of being an open source design workflow application, the Joget WordPress plugin allows exporting of flow XPDL as backup working efficiently on both Linux and windows operating systems. Embedding the whole Joget workflow process mechanism into any WordPress page is simply done by migrating to the update process page and clicking on the “Show Additional Info” link which showcases the desired link url also referred to as known as “Link To Run Process”.

9. Recent Revisions

Recent Revisions plugin is ideally suited for WordPress based websites with a large user base editing content at regular intervals. The recent revision plugin is a boom to the website administrators allowing for a single interface which showcases an overview of all recent content revisions done by the team. Recent revisions plugin uses the administrative dashboard to display the revision overview statistics and details which can be customized by the administrator by author name, date and size of the content. The plugin based on the ideas generated by the dashboard recent posts extended plugin works with all WordPress websites using version 2.7 or above. Recent revision while allowing for administrators to track all edits on the website, display all edited posts in GMT time zones making it a lot simpler to track users from different geographical time zones. The full functionality of the plugin is enhanced on large quantum multiple authored websites allowing effective synchronization of the website team using different time zones a simple breeze.

10. Approval Workflow

Approval Workflow is one of the most popular and widely used multiple authored website centric WordPress plugin aimed at improving workflow progress of multiple authored websites. The plugin brings in an element of resourcefulness in improving the overall workflow process by acknowledging website users for all administrative rights including editing and publishing for submitted posts. Approval workflow is embedded with artificial intelligence rooted in its coding structure and allows for a search generation module by short listing users with publishing rights after successful submission of content by all authors on the platform work desk module. While reaching out to the administrative team, Approval workflow plugin improves the overall workflow competence removing any possible time centric delays from content submissions, editing to final content publication. Testimony to the approval workflow’s intelligent coding structure and design is its ability to send automatic mails email to users with publishing rights in case of the user submitting the content doesn’t has publishing rights. This feature allows all users with submissions rights to be aware of the recent post and content generation while removing any delays and communication issues between the users and the editorial team and the administrators. Since manual searching of users with adequate publishing rights for new content may not always be possible for large content based websites having multiple user bases, approval workflow allows the administrative team to ease the workflow process by automatically checking for user rights and sending appropriate mailers to concerned users with publishing rights.

There are indeed hundreds of WordPress plugins available that are worth mentioning. These are the plugins that make WordPress work wonders for you and also enables WordPress to be the CMS of choice by millions. However, stated above are the top ten plugins that helped me in boosting my blog and also helped me in managing a smooth and unhindered editorial workflow. How many out of these have you tried? If not tried any then go ahead and try out these handy plugins for your WordPress blog or site and do let me know which one amongst these turned into your favorite lately? Also let me know if I have missed out on any important plugin, your feedback is always welcome.