Create a simple and convenient workflow process for multiple WordPress bloggers using two plugins.
Posting content on WordPress is almost too easy. You paste text into a box and click publish, and your post is instantly pushed to your thousands of Twitter followers. Then you check the published post and find a grammatical war-zone…
Being an unashamed stickler for textual accuracy, I’ve put in place a system to catch occasional lapses by my team of WordPress content editors at LCF. Here’s how it works.
Step 1: Status notifications
Download and install the WP Status Notifier plugin. This plugin is in charge of sending emails to and from contributors and a specified approver when the status of a piece of content changes. The settings screen (Settings > Status Notifications) should look like this (fill in your admin email address of course):
WP Status Notifier settings panel.
Step 2: Roles and Capabilities
First of all, read up on the Roles and Capabilities documentation in the WordPress Codex. Next, install the Capability Manager plugin. You now have to configure the plugin to ensure that all those users whose posts you want to moderate are prevented from doing so automatically. Go to Users > Capabilities.
Most of my contributors are in fact WordPress ‘editors’ – and by default they can publish posts and pages. Therefore we need to uncheck these capabilities from the editor capabilities table.
Managing roles and capabilities in WordPress.
I would recommend installing the Roles and Capabilities plugin in any case – it’s often useful to strip out options and menus where they’re not needed, or to give certain capabilities to a user you don’t necessarily want to make an admin.
Step 3: Moderate and go
Provided you’ve configured your users’ capabilities correctly, you should now receive an email whenever a post is ready for approval. This will happen the first time a user clicks ‘Save’ (be wary here about jumping in to approve instantly – the user might still be editing the content). Once you’ve had a chance to check the content and click Publish, the author will receive a confirmation email.