Manage Author Profiles and Posts on Multi-Author WordPress Blog

Multi-Author WordPress Blog

Running a WordPress blog all by yourself is a pretty simple task. However, it is a completely different ball game if you are running a multi-author blog. There are many questions one has to answer before allowing multiple authors to take your blog as their own publishing platform. Some common concerns for blog owners when taking this step are…

• Will all the blog posts of the various authors be visible on the same blog page?
• If they are on the same blog page, how will the readers be able to filter their favorite authors’ posts?
• Should I allow all authors access to my WordPress Dashboard?

If any of these questions crossed your mind as well, then you are in the right place today. That’s because I am going to talk about a highly efficient way of blog organization on multi-author blogs. You will no longer have to bother about all those challenging questions as ProfileGrid has brought the answers right to your doorstep (or should I say blogstep).

ProfileGrid as Multi-Author Blog Organizer

So, how does ProfileGrid organizes all these multi-author blog posts? Well, ProfileGrid does that by displaying multi-author blog posts on each author’s user profile automatically. Since ProfileGrid improves immensely upon the default WordPress profile system, organizing multi-author blog posts is also one of the key functions of it.

Let us assume, for example, that we have 3 fictitious authors on our WordPress blog: Shirley, Kate & Paul. Each with their own area of interest on blogging. If all three of them post one blog post each, then those three blog posts will all appear on the same Latest Posts page. Like this…

You can only imagine how complicated this blog can become for readers once it has hundreds of blog posts and authors.

Now let’s see how ProfileGrid solves this problem. But first, we need to install and activate it on our blog.

Alright, we are done with installing and activating ProfileGrid. Having ProfileGrid on our WordPress blog will add some really powerful social interactivity elements to it. I’ll be discussing more of its features in a later article though.

Next, we’ll visit the ‘Global Settings’ on ProfileGrid.

Inside the ‘Global Settings’, we’ll open the ‘User Blogs’ settings.

Inside the ‘User Blogs’ setting, enable the blog tab on profiles by switching on the ‘Enable Blog’ option. And then set the value for the ‘Fetch Posts From’ option to ‘Posts’.

There are other options on this screen too but I’ll come to those a bit later. For now, we are all set to display the blog posts on each authors’ individual profile. Let’s see how this setting works when live…

As you can see, on one of our authors’ profile, only the blog post that was published by her is appearing on her profile. Likewise, blog posts will display on other author profiles as well.

Create Blog Posts from Front-end

It is not just the displaying of blog posts, but with ProfileGrid, authors can now also create new blog posts from the comfort of their user profiles from the front-end. New blog posts can be created from the front-end by a simple click on the ‘New Blog Post’ button just above the display of blog posts.

Once a user clicks on this button, ProfileGrid provides a complete page to create blog posts from the front-end itself.

No longer will you have to worry about users making unintended changes to your blog from the WordPress Dashboard, as they can now create blog posts from their own frontend user profiles.

You can have more control on how blog posts can be published from the frontend by revisiting the ‘User Blogs’ settings we explored a bit earlier. Whether you want to set the default blog post status or disallow featured image, tags, TinyMCE editor etc. All the controls are right at your fingertips from the ‘User Blogs’ settings.