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One of the new trends for websites and blogs is a shift toward multi-author CMS styled sites.By mult-author, I mean sites like Famous Bloggers and DragonBlogger, that offer guest writers and staff writer positions. These sites have a lot writers and articles by different authors posted anywhere from just a few articles a day to five or more daily articles. All of this new contents brings in a lot of new and returning traffic.
Lets face it, this a lot of work for the site owner, but this kind of content creation, brings in a lot of traffic and new talent you a site. If done right, this can be a huge benefit to a low traffic site. 
The Best Multi-Author WordPress Plugins of 2012
Today, I share with you a collection of great multi-author plugins that have recently been updated and I think might be helpful for those wanting to create a multi-author site or already have one that is in need of some tools to help them out. Image Source: Flickr. All screenshots in the collection, were used from the WordPress Directory.
These plugins won’t help bring in new traffic or get you new writers (that’s up to you), but it will make it easy to manage your writers and edit their articles once they have submitted them for review.
Also, if you are interested in guest writing for Evolutionary Designs or even possibly becoming a staff writer for Evolutionary Designs, please contact us for details. We are currently working on adding new staff writing positions in the near future and are looking for designers, SEO/SEM, developers, WordPress lovers, tutorial writers, and photographers to join us.
Editorial Calendar
“Did you remember to write a post for next Tuesday? What about the Tuesday after that? WordPress doesn’t make it easy to see when your posts are scheduled. The editorial calendar gives you an overview of your blog and when each post will be published. You can drag and drop to move posts, edit posts right in the calendar, and manage your entire blog.” Download | Information
Audit Trail Plugin
“Audit Trail is a plugin to keep track of what is going on inside your blog. It does this by recording certain actions (such as who logged in and when) and storing this information in the form of a log. Not only that but it records the full contents of posts (and pages) and allows you to restore a post to a previous version at any time.”
Dashboard Notepad
“This dashboard widget provides a simple notepad. The widget settings allow you to choose which roles can edit the notes, and which roles can merely read them. Version 1.30 also adds support for custom roles and integrates with the Members plugin for role settings.”
Advanced Access Manager
“Advanced Access Manager is very powerful and flexible Access Control tool for your WordPress website. It supports Single WordPress installation and Multisite setup. This is the basic list of features you can perform”
User Photo
“Allows a user to associate a profile photo with their account through their “Your Profile” page. Admins may add a user profile photo by accessing the “Edit User” page. Uploaded images are resized to fit the dimensions specified on the options page; a thumbnail image correspondingly is also generated. User photos may be displayed within a post or a comment to help identify the author.”
Co-Authors Plus
“Assign multiple bylines to posts, pages, and custom post types via a search-as-you-type input box. Co-authored posts appear on a co-author’s archive page and in their feed. Co-authors may edit the posts they are associated with, and co-authors who are contributors may only edit posts if they have not been published (as is core behavior).”
Private Messages For WordPress
“The Private Messages For WordPress allows users of WordPress blog send private messages (PM) to each other. Users will have their own inbox and outbox. Administrators of blog can control total numbers of items in mailbox of each user group (Administrator, Editor, Author, Constributor and Subscriber).”
WP Status Notifier
“WP Status Notifier will send a notification to given email address(es) of posts pending review by contributors. It can also optionally notify the contributors when their post is accepted or rejected. WP Status Notifier is useful for moderation in blogs with multiple contributors.”
BuddyPress
“BuddyPress lets users sign-up and start creating profiles, posting messages, making connections, creating and interacting in groups, and much more. A social network in a box, BuddyPress lets you easily build a community for your company, school, sports team, or other niche community.”
Members
“Members is a plugin that extends your control over your blog. It’s a user, role, and content management plugin that was created to make WordPress a more powerful CMS.”
Author Advertising Plugin
“This plugin allows blog admins to create a revenue sharing program utilising one of the many advertising programs out there i.e Yahoo, Google Adsense, Amazon, Allposters etc. It can also be used as a banner manager, author photo/website widgets.. actually it has about a zillion uses. Give it a try and lemme know if you use it for anything really groovy.”
Fanciest Author Box
“Fanciest Author Box is a WordPress plugin developed by ThematoSoup. It’s long list of features allows you to give identity to your single or multi-author WordPress blog.
This premium author bio plugin is very easy to use and customize. Right after installation the author bio is, by default, enabled on all your posts, pages and custom post types. You can also implement it as a widget in your sidebars, as a template tag or manually using a shortcode. It’s translation ready and users color pickers which allow you to set your own color scheme.”
About James
[…] “Today, I share with you a collection of great multi-author plugins that have recently been updated and I think might be helpful for those wanting to create a multi-author site or already have one that is in need of some tools to help them out. Image Source: Flickr. All screenshots in the collection, were used from the WordPress Directory.” Check out the article here. […]