20 Plugins to Manage Multiple Authors WordPress Sites

WordPress is an easy CMS to run your blog. So much easy to use that it now powers more than 30% of the web. You can write, edit, and publish your post in a very convenient interface.

However, when it comes to managing multiple authors, WordPress comes short of necessary features. And this is where plugins come into play.

In this post, we gathered and tested a number of plugins that will enhance the capabilities of WordPress for managing multiple authors on your blog. Let’s take a look at the list.

1. Adminimize

If you have multiple authors working on the site, you might be thinking to hide some items that these authors don’t actually need to see on the admin area. This plugin enables you to hide items from the WordPress admin area such as the menu, meta field, or any other according to your requirements.

2. Our Todo List

This plugin adds a box on the post editor where you can add a todo list. On each of the list, you can add the keywords, notes, a URL, assign it to a particular user, and set the priority. It’s very convenient for collaborating with multiple authors on a single post.

3. Simple Author Box

This plugin makes it easy to add an author box where you can show the author avatar, bio, and their social media URLs.

4. WP User Avatars

This plugin allows users to upload their own image for their avatar on the site. It’s more convenient for your authors to upload their avatars themselves rather than the admin setting their avatar in Gravatar.

5. Edit Flow

Add a useful editorial calendar to your WordPress with this plugin. You can see the post schedule (weekly or monthly), a custom status for each post, a section for editors and writers to add comments, and many more features that enhance the experience of collaborating and publishing on WordPress.

6. PublishPress

PublishPress adds features quite similar to Edit Flow with the Calendar, Custom Status, and Notification that improve the overall editing experience with multiple authors. On top of that, it also provides a separate set of plugins to provide more features; one of which is PublishPress Authors

7. PublishPress Authors

This plugin extends the author management feature in WordPress. For instance, it allows you to add multiple authors on a single post and create guest authors without having to create a real account for them. This plugin is also already compatible with Gutenberg.

8. Co-Authors Plus

A plugin that extends the Author metabox in the post editor that enables assigning multiple authors to a single post, and creates a byline for guest authors without creating an account for the author.

At the time of writing, however, this plugin does not support Gutenberg natively, so within the Gutenberg editor, it will still appear as a classic metabox.

9. WP User Frontend

This plugin features a frontend editor and uploader for user profiles which enables users to manage their account and send their post from the site’s front-end rather than from the wp-admin.

If you want to build user-generated blogs like Dev.to or Medium, this is the plugin you’re looking for.

10. WP Email Users

This plugin allows you to send emails to registered users on your site. The email can be plain or rich text format, with or without attachment. It’s SMTP-ready and compatible with external SMTP services like Sendgrid, GMail, and Amazon SES.

11. Pre-Publish Checklist

This plugin helps you in preventing an incomplete post from getting published. You can build a checklist and enable it on certain post types. The plugin will remind the author to complete each task before publishing the post.

12. Editorial Calendar

This plugin adds a calendar that provides a better overview of the posts to be published. You can drag-n-drop a post from one date to another to change the schedule.

13. WP Revisions Control

Having multiple authors writing posts on your site means you will end up with thousands of revisions. These revisions could contribute to the database size significantly, so it’s always better to control how many revisions you’d like to keep for each post. This plugin can help you to do that conveniently from the WordPress Dashboard.

14. Edit Author Slug

This plugin allows you to edit the user permalinks. You can change both the permalink base which, by default, is “/author/” as well as the author slug which is default to the author’s username.

Not only that, it also provides greater control over the Author URL and adds an extra layer of security with the author’s permalink changed; making it harder to guess the author’s username.

15. Author Avatars List

This plugin makes it easy to show a list of the author avatars on a page using a shortcode. It is already compatible with Gutenberg as well as other plugins that add custom type of users such as Co-Author Plus, Ultimate Member, and BBpress.

16. Molongui Authorship

This plugin features an Author Box which will automatically display the author info, bio, social icons, and related posts, attribute multiple authors in a single post, and attribute posts to guest authors without requiring a real WordPress account.

17. Members

A plugin that offers extended features to manage members and users in WordPress. Among other things, the plugin allows you to edit the Role capability directly inside the WordPress dashboard, add multiple roles to a single user, clone a user role, add logins and widgets, and make the site private.

18. Guest Author

As the name implies, this plugin enables you to add a guest user without requiring a WordPress account. A perfect choice, if you need a simple smaller plugin that does this specifically.

19. Share Notes on Dashboard

Allows you to add a note directly on the WordPress dashboard. As the dashboard is the first page that users see when they are logged in, it is a good place to drop notes, ideas, and todo list using this plugin.

20. Post Status Notifier (Lite)

A plugin with which you can send notifications to the contributors and authors when their post status changes e.g. when it’s published. The plugin is compatible with all kinds of post types and taxonomies and is integrated with some plugins out of the box, including WP Job Manager and Advanced Custom Fields.