For someone who has a bit of experience with WordPress, blogging is easy. But if you log-in to WordPress for the first time to publish an article, you might be overwhelmed by the many fields and settings that are shown in the editor. Especially when the webmaster has activated a lot of plug-ins, the editor-screen will be filled.
Especially when you’re the administrator or moderator of a corporate blog that is written by many people, it is sometimes difficult to give everybody the right instructions and explanation. Moreover, the more editors there are the more difficult it is to keep everybody informed of new functionality or new guidelines.
Luckily there are other WordPress plug-ins available that can help the administrator or moderator to improve the user experience of the various authors, especially for those that are not very familiair with WordPress. Below I’ve summed up five of them that I’m considering to use on our corporate blogs.
Admin msg board
With the Admin msg board you can add a messaging system in your Wordpress admin area. This allows you to inform everybody about changes, new functionality, new guidelines, tips & trics, statistics and topic suggestions in their own admin area. Especially if there are more authors, this can be an ideal way of keeping everybody informed.
WP-CMS post control
A complaint I sometimes hear about WordPress is that there are too many fields in the post editor screen. And indeed, for the regular author there are a lot of fields that are hardly used or totally not used. WIth the WP-CMS post control plug-in it is possible to determin for every WordPress role which controls are available. This makes it a lot easier for less experienced editors, as their screen will be less cluttered.
Simple tags
Depending on how you’re blog is designed, tagging your post in the right way can be very important. Not only for SEO purposes, search engines use you tags a lot to determin the content of your post, but also for the navigation of your blog. If you have ‘related posts’ shown underneath your articles you’ll see that they are sometimes also relying on the post tags. The Simple Tags plugin can help users with tag suggestions. The plug-in looks at the tags and uses services as Yahoo! and Zemanta, but also your own tag archive, to suggest the best tags for you’re content while you’re writing it.
Genki pre-publish reminder
When writing a post, you have to do quite some stuff to have it published in the right way. Of course you have to write your content, but sometimes also an excerpt. You have to place your post in the right category, you have to tag it, you can schedule it for future publication or post it right away. Depending on your template you might need to add an extra picture to go with the article, specify some SEO requirements and indicate whether or not comments to the post can be made. With the Genki pre-publish reminder the administrator or moderator of the blog can add a checklist of all necessary actions to the post editor screen. This can work as a checklist for all authors, so they can never forget a single step in the process.
Front-end editor
Everybody who writes a blog knows the drill: after you have published a post in the back-end of your blog, you normally go to the front-end to see what it looks like. When you then want to make a change to the article, you have to click several times before you’re back in the post editor screen. With the Front-end editor plug-in that is no longer necessary. Just look at your blog and all area’s that you are allowed to edit will light-up as soon as you hoover over with your mouse. Double-click and there you go: you can adjust the title, excerpt, text or settings right from the front-end of your blog.
