WordPress started as a simple blogging platform in 2003. Within no time it has emerged as a winning content management system (CMS). More and more people are on their way exploring its endless list of features and functions and are harnessing its power for media portals, publishing, blogging, corporate websites/blogs and so much more. One would dare not go against its throbbing online audience and argue that WordPress isn’t here to stay.

I have been also using WordPress for many years now and love its flexibility. But once my team started to grow, I had no other option but to cobble together a variety of tools, including Basecamp, email, online spreadsheets, docs and instant messengers, to manage what passes for an editorial workflow but in reality it is wildly inefficient.

My team comprises of writers, copy editors and freelancers and i have been handling my team for almost a decade now. At one point of time we even hired a consultant to advise us on just moving away from WordPress and deploy some enterprise CMS. But thankfully WordPress developers have come out with some brilliant solutions and platforms for publishers like me to manage and leverage large networks of content contributors, whether they be paid journalists or guest writers for my network. Here are some of them.

1. Content Cloud: Content Cloud (Betaout) is hosted plug and play newsroom platform for publishers running their content portals on WordPress. Publishers using WordPress can use ContentCloud to manage a large number of contributors for content production. They definitely have the best interface for any WordPress solution I have tried till date. It’s intuitive, clean, well structured and simple to use. From first impressions, Content Cloud looks very minimalistic especially their Workbench app, but it is highly powerful and customizable once you get an access to your Settings Panel in Content Cloud.

You can create multiple workflows for a single publication and can share a desks across these workflows. Assignments are routed via these workflows and you can either pre-define the contributors for each stage of the assignment or make it available to any user on that desk. Editors through their Newsroom app can keep an eye on the progress of the assignment. Definitely, ContentCloud is one of the best solutions for any serious WordPress publisher looking for efficient newsroom.

2. Newsflow: Newsflow plugin was initially named as Hypernews. Newsflow is good in editorial support with quick speed user interface for manually selecting and publishing several RSS streams in the WordPress blog or site. You can add links with the link management option. The Hypernews UI helps in fetching and listing all the feeds, along with monitoring the read items and could mark them as favorites or even hide them.

It also helps me in making a couple of notes over the item row. If the editor wants to edit them in WordPress, this can be done by clicking on the link of that particular post type. Also, the editor can save the post in draft for further edit work.

3. Role Scoper: Role Scoper is an effective access control solution, rendering you CMS kind of control of editing and reading permissions. I can assign restrictions and roles to several specific pages, posts or several categories. The WordPress core role definition never changes and works as default permissions. I can alter user access only when I expand it by assigning content specific roles or simply when I reduce it by setting the content specific restrictions.

Any level of user gets the authority to read or edit content of your pick. The restricted content can be withdrawn from the users lacking content specific role, irrespective of their WP role.

4. Revisionary: If you want to allow a couple of your users to submit changes to the published content, along with your editor checking those changes before it publishes, then Revisionary is the plugin for you. It helps me in enabling the qualified users to submit changes to the currently published pages or posts. The various contributors get the authority to submit revisions for their own published content.

All these changes, when gets approved by an editor could be published instantly or could be scheduled for some further publication. It works with blog wide WP roles along with concurrence with Role Scoper or Press Permit.

5. Assignment Desk: Assignment Desk plugin is an editorial tool for news companies using WP platforms as their content management system. The objective of Assignment Desk is to help the editor and his team in making the production process simple and productive. It helps the community members to submit different tips or ideas to the news companies, and thus help the story in different ways while preserving editorial oversight. Once the story idea is accepted, Assignment Desk helps the users to participate in this specific story reporting. The editor has the authority to assign or withdraw any role to different users via this plugin.

These are my favorite top five plugins, hope you have a great experience exploring them. Do let me know about your favorite plugin.