WordPress is the most favored CMS today. Over the past few years more and more developers are turning to WordPress to deliver accessible websites to their clients. It is used by many content networks and seasoned journalists. TechCrunch, Mashable, GigaOM are some of the well known content networks powered by WordPress.

WordPress undoubtedly is the most admired content management system and though a very stable and mature product it is a bit limited in its core functionality for multi author newsrooms. The present day newsrooms are facing falling CPMs and tough competitors are making use of smaller editorial staff to manage a broader group of internal and external contributors and that too across multiple locations. They are collectively producing much higher volumes of content to feed the web’s 24/7 news cycle. This complex editorial workflow became very difficult to implement using WordPress.

Rapidly growing WordPress publishers today need efficient and smart processes for their newsroom. Processes which can help them out in various matters such as tips, questions, assignments, performance tracking and much more into an online effective workflow. To support all these processes you would definitely want to put your WordPress newsroom on steroids that would boost your newsroom workflow to extreme heights. You would want WordPress newsroom steroids to not only control the falling CPMs but rather scale your CPMs to new heights.

If you want your WordPress newsrooms on steroids, then you definitely need to try out the following five plugins that are no less than steroids and would enhance the effectiveness your WordPress newsroom. These WordPress newsroom steroids will help reduce strain on editors and automate a lot of administrative work involved through editorial processes.

1. ContentCloud

Betaout’s highly evolved ContentCloud plugin offers successful handling of multiple editorial teams panned across various WordPress
websites using a single interface. The ContentCloud plugin developed as a SaaS (Software as a Service) is based on the plug and play
architecture and weaves workflows for editorial teams by assigning individual as well as team workflow management. With a single account, the plugin can be used across multiple websites with integration and collaboration between team members as its intrinsic feature.

The plugin not only offers a smart workflow management solution but also makes sure that the editorial team is focused on the content and not on the collaboration aspects between various members. The plugin helps in increase productivity by offering customized workflows with an easy to understand interface requiring no special familiarization time.

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2. Edit Flow

Edit Flow is an Editorial Plugin precisely designed for WordPress based Blogs and Websites. I am pretty fond of this plugin because of its versatile activity support and features. This plugin came across me when I started my first big online publishing blog. In that blog I had to assign multiple writers to contribute content directly to my blog without publishing manually. This plugin helped me to establish a structure workflow and content flow in a pre-planned manner. This plugin offers an extended WordPress dashboard with post calendar that displays published posts on daily basis.

This plugin also helps to keep track of previous editorial activities along with extended information in editorial metadata. It also provides a storyboard view of the upcoming posts or publication. It helps to define various key stages of the editorial workflow that basically helps to maintain or moderate the blog on overall basis. It also keeps a thread like structure for each post along with editorial comments which is visible to only writers and specially assigned users of the blog. This plugin also features a notification system to notify the users about the workflow. The feature that I prefer most in this plugin is the User Group, which allows me to organize my writers in various department and teams.

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3. Approval Workflow

Approval Workflow plugin improves the workflow mechanism of multiple authored websites. This plugin allows verification of users for various publishing and administrative rights for their respective articles or posts. The plugin works by adding a small box to the side of the post edit screen demarking users without publishing permission rights for the particular post. The plugin also allows administrators with publishing rights to set a WordPress role for the approver.

One of the most interactive features of the approval workflow plugin is that it sends individual notifications via email to all the users with publishing rights when a new post has been added to the WordPress platform thereby cutting down publication time. While reaching out to the publisher the plug-in not only improves efficiency but also cuts out any time discrepancies in submission and publication. Approval workflow plugin with all its features works just as well on WordPress multisite as it does on simple multiple user websites.

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4. Role Scoper

Role Scoper WordPress plugin is a power plugin enabling any WordPress powered website with single or multiple users to act as a state of the art CMS platform. Not only does the plugin helps in reducing costs for developing a standalone CMS website platform for any website according to its needs, the Role Scoper plugin allows comprehensive access control solution restricting multiple users roles to specific pages, posts or categories.

Users can be upgraded or downgraded to read respective posts or categories as desired. Removing the role scoper plug-in or deactivation makes sure that default functionality of all users gets resorted. One of the most powerful features of the Role Scoper plugin is that the core user permissions remain unchanged while offering customized permissions for various pages and posts.

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