Tools that help authors communicate

When you’re running a multi-author site, communication is crucial for shar-
ing information, giving and receiving inspiration, and making certain that
no two authors are writing the same (or a similar) article on your site. Use
the following tools to help you manage the flow of communication between
everyone involved:

✦ WP Status Notifier (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/
wp-status-notifier): In the section “Understanding User Roles
and Capabilities,” earlier in this chapter, we mention that the role of
Contributor can write and save posts to your site, but those posts don’t get published to the site until an Administrator approves them. This plugin notifies the Contributor author, via e-mail, when his post is published to (or rejected by) your site.
✦ Editorial Calendar (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/
editorial-calendar): This plugin gives you an overview of scheduled
posts, post authors, and the dates when you scheduled the posts to
publish to your blog. This plugin can help you prevent multiple author
posts from publishing too close together or, in some cases, right on top
of one another by enabling you to reschedule posts by using a drag-and-
drop interface.
✦ Email Users (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/email-
users): This plugin allows you to send e-mails out to all registered users of your blog, and users can send e-mails back and forth to one another by using the plugin interface in the Dashboard. This tool provides the authors and users on your multi-author blog the ability to keep in touch and communicate with one another.
✦ Subscribe to Authors Post Feed (http://wordpress.org/extend/
plugins/subscribe-to-author-posts-feed): This plugin adds
an RSS feed to each author’s post archives, which allows you, other
users, and site visitors to subscribe to that author’s RSS feed so that you
receive immediate notification through your RSS feed reader when the
author publishes new content.
✦ Dashboard Notepad (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/
dashboard-notepad): This plugin gives you a widget that appears on
your main Dashboard page and allows you and other users (depending
on the user role that you set in the plugin options) to leave notes for
each other. You can use this plugin to ask and answer questions, and to
create to-do lists for your authors.