Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

From time to time I’ve discussed on this blog managing multiple writers for my blog network, Blogtown Press. Mainly I’ve dealt with the odds and ends of finding, organizing, and paying bloggers to writer on one or many of my various blogs. Those articles are helpful but they haven’t really given tips on helping with the task of managing these writers through Wordpress.

Managing writers, even with wordpress can be a big task. While there are plugins that help you it’s always tough to sort through them all and find the plugins that help you the most. Well, I recently began to rekindle my interest with the internet, blogging, and building a business by paying freelance writers to build content and thought I’d begin to share some tips with my readers about how this process is going.

I’ll jump into the business side of things more a little later (recently I created an LLC for one of my blogs and hope to expand that blog into a full business with possible full-time employees.) But first let me pass along some information on a plugin I happened across. The plugin is Role Manager which allows you to set specific rules for the roles inherent in Wordpress and change how they act. While the codex for role management does a little bit to help you understand the roles capability, it doesn’t really give you full control over what these various roles can do. They’re predefined.

Well the Role Manager plugin lets you change that by providing an interface to manage the inherent roles. Also, which is probably the best part of the plugin, is that it allows you to create new roles and set options for them. For example, let’s say you have most of your writers setup as contributors but you want one of them to have the added ability to upload files, like images. You don’t want to give everyone the chance to upload files, because you might not trust everyone as much as this person to upload non-malicious files, so what do you do?

You can create a new role and set it to a contributor upload role, or whatever name you choose obviously. You can then have everything the same as the settings for a contributor but the new role will allow this special subset of contributors to upload files.

This is just one example but you can see how this wordpress plugin allows you to customize and better manage your writers and members of your wordpress site to be able to have more features than the defaults. This allows you, as an employer of freelance writers to give your writers more options without giving away all the accessibility of say, an Editor.