Managing the content across your website can require constant editorial collaboration. When you have multiple copywriters, marketers, and product page contributors, it’s vital to ensure that every page aligns with your brand image, voice, message, and core page design principles. Of course, website editors often face a number of challenges in the enterprise editorial workflow. Miscommunication, approval delays, scheduling issues, and version conflicts can result in an inconsistent customer experience or late publications that throw off your carefully made plans regarding your brand’s website and content strategy.
The good news is that WordPress includes a complete toolkit to help optimize editorial collaboration and streamline content workflows. We’ve compiled the top five WordPress features that will empower your editorial collaboration efforts. Each feature will help website editors plan, manage, and coordinate content collaboration to result in an ideal on-site experience for visitors.
WordPress Features for Editorial Collaboration
What are the most important features of WordPress for website editors and editorial collaboration? We will take a deep dive into the following five features that can transform your workflow when used correctly:
- User Roles and Permissions
- Editorial Plugins
- WP Block Editor
- Page Revision History
- Third-Party Collaboration Tools
1. User Roles and Permissions
Roles and permissions are a core feature of WordPress, making it possible to control how different team members and users contribute to the website. While most sites focus on the difference between a web admin and a customer-user, there are far more refined ways to assign roles and permissions that can help clarify ownership of specific tasks and responsibilities within the workflow of editorial management.
Editors can coordinate their contributor teams by assigning permissions and safeguarding content by limiting access to key functions. It becomes possible to streamline team workflows by assigning roles like “Contributor,” “Writer,” and “Editor” with different permissions and access levels.
- The contributor might be someone who can create a draft or submit unpublished changes.
- The writer might be someone authorized to update, edit, or draft specific pages or content types
- Editors may be the only accounts with permission to publish pages or changes after approval
Apt use of user roles ensures clear task management while protecting sensitive settings. In addition to the base feature, several WordPress plugins enhance and add greater sophistication to the user roles and permission functionality.
Example
As an example, consider a publishing house that uses roles to assign content creation to Writers and final review to Editors. This process helps to avoid missteps during production so that only checked, edited, and approved content is pushed to the public site for customers or stakeholders to view.
2. Custom Workflows With Editorial Plugins
Editorial plugins add functionality to the composition, revision, approval, and publishing workflow for website content. Structured workflows reduce bottlenecks during content creation and streamline the review process so that each piece achieves perfection and publication on time. You can use plugins like Edit Flow or PublishPress to manage workflows, track article progress, and set deadlines.
- Revisions Workflow
- PublishPress features a Revisions toolkit that allows writers to submit content for revision, editors to submit specific revision requests, and the revision workflow to be scheduled to optimize completion timelines.
- Custom Statuses
- The plugin Edit Flow adds custom statuses like “Draft,” “Needs Review,” or “Ready to Publish,” which lets users clearly label content as it goes through the creation, revision, and approval process.
- Editorial Comments
- The editorial comments feature makes it possible for requests and discussions to take place regarding the editorial process for each piece of content.
- Content Scheduling
- Scheduling and calendar features give you the ability to schedule approved content to publish at a specific time in the future.
- Editorial Notifications
- Notifications to alert team members of pending tasks or content ready for review
- Editorial Permissions
- Special user permissions are required for creating and completing revisions, and there are even specific content requirements that must be met when new content is created.
Example
A good example of this workflow might be a media company that uses the Edit Flow calendar to organize a month’s worth of content. This ensures timely publishing across teams, in which special content statuses help communicate and streamline the workflow for on-time content publication.
3. Real-Time Collaboration with Block Editor (Gutenberg)
WordPress’s Gutenberg Block Editor makes it possible to section up content and edit different blocks separately from one another. The block editor reduces the risk of version conflicts during team collaboration.
Individual Block Editing
Team members can independently work on individual blocks such as text, images, and content segments. Each writer or contributor may be responsible for a different block, ensuring that their work does not conflict or overlap while changes are being made and that an entire page of content can be worked on simultaneously without version conflicts resulting.
This allows you to work faster and more efficiently by addressing content in blocks instead of one page at a time.
Reusable Blocks
Reusable blocks are extremely useful. They are often implemented across website pages to ensure brand consistency on every page of content. This allows you to hone the design or content of a single reused block and see the changes reflected across the site.
Special Block Management
Plugins and custom design can result in additional blocks that can enhance pages and add greater sophistication to the editorial process. Blocks can be unified or separated to make it easier to change exactly the intended pages and designs with each edit. Custom and special blocks can be used to ensure precise control over editorial changes.
Example
An effective example of using the block editor for editorial collaboration is marketing teams that collaboratively update campaign landing pages by editing individual blogs. Thanks to Gutenberg’s block-based structure, they can avoid stepping on each other’s edits.
4. Revision History
Revision History, WordPress’s version control feature, tracks every revision, recording what changed, who made the change, and when it happened. This built-in WordPress feature works seamlessly with editorial plugins, giving editors full control over recent changes.
Editorial Oversight
Using revision history, editors can see recent changes and check historical versions of the page. They can monitor who made the most popular changes and who has been working on pages recently. Editors can review both published and unpublished changes to inform their editorial process.
Roll Back Recent Changes
Revision history allows editors to roll back recent changes if they were published without approval, if the content was deleted by accident, or if strategies were reverted. Editors can easily correct copywriter mistakes or approve changes that were published too early. This includes restoring lost content by checking previous versions.
Resolve Editorial Conflicts
If two people are editing the same page or block at the same time, this can result in version conflicts in which one person’s work (the person who saved first) might be lost. However, with revision history, an editor can easily review both sets of work and combine or approve the best version of the recent changes. This can allow you to easily resolve editorial conflicts that sometimes result from working with a multi-person content team.
Example
A great example of revision history use can be seen if a team member accidentally deletes critical content. The editor can easily restore the post to its original version within seconds using WordPress’s revision history feature.
5. Integration With Third-Party Collaboration Tools
As many editors know, third-party tools like Trello, Slack, and Google Drive can enhance your operations and workflow. However, WordPress also allows you to directly integrate many tools through plugins to streamline your editorial workflow across platforms and more easily keep your entire team focused through a unified set of tools.
Through these tools, you can automate updates and sync content tasks with external platforms. You can also enable seamless sharing of assets (e.g., images, drafts) within the WordPress dashboard.
Trello WordPress
Trello offers KanBan boards, easy scheduling tools, and other collaboration frameworks to help keep your team on track. This can ensure coordinated work, review, and approval by the deadline to pre-schedule all planned content and updates.
The Trello plugin for WordPress makes it possible to create and manage Trello cards through WordPress forms, log progress, and connect to Trello cards through integrated tasks.
Slack WordPress
The Slack plugin for WordPress allows you to generate alerts and updates in your team’s Slack communication platform based on site activity.
Google Drive WordPress
The WordPress plugin for Google Drive allows you to connect documents and project files directly through your WordPress website, enhancing presentation and sharing reference documents to guide your team or enhance page content.
WP Document Revisions
The WP Documents Revisions plugin allows you to store files above the public_html web root so that only authorized users have access to unpublished work.
Zapier
The Zapier plugin allows you to automate actions between different applications through your WordPress site or based on website activities. This can help to coordinate actions between third-party tools to further enhance your editorial workflow.
Example
An example of using third-party tools might be a global media company that syncs its WordPress editorial calendar with Trello, ensuring all stakeholders can track content progress.
Empowering Teams Through Better Tools
Editorial content management of a major WordPress website is a vital part of many modern businesses. Editors often work with large teams of content creators, page designers, and copywriters while acting as the single point of coordination to ensure each change is accurate, on-brand, and released on schedule.
You can enhance your editorial coordination workflow by making the best use of these key WordPress features. Assign refined user roles and permissions to control who can make which changes. Build custom workflows with editorial plugins and enact real-time collaboration with the Gutenberg blog editor. Make use of revision history to maintain oversight, roll back unintended changes, and explore the potential of third-party integration to further enhance your management capabilities.
Leveraging WordPress for enterprise editorial needs gets easier with each tool you master, Invest in tools to boost collaboration and efficiency to achieve the best possible ROI.
Ready to enhance your team’s editorial workflows? Ndevr specializes in customizing WordPress to meet the unique needs of enterprise clients. Contact us today for a free consultation and discover how we can make collaboration effortless for your team!
