I have set up a WordPress inside a client’s website. They will be having guest bloggers and I’ve never handled that. It seems using the ‘Pending Review’ and having ‘editors’ in place should solve that moderation task, but when I tried it, the ‘editor’ can see all the posts in the blog dashboard. There seems to be no protection.

Would a guest blogger be set up as a ‘user’?

Are there WP plugins to handle this as well?

Looking forward to wise comments from this group

@michellefontaine Great advice from  @carolinechen-whatley on the topic.  I have all of my guest bloggers set as Contributors which is the least permissions possible with the ability to add posts.  I would suggest creating an account, giving it a role like Contributor or Author, then logging in as that user to see what they can do and modifying their role if it is too much or not enough.

@fredericgonzalo you can setup the roles under “Users”.  Then use “Invite New” and pick their “Role” at the top.

You may find this post useful:  http://en.support.wordpress.com/user-roles/

It explains what the roles are and a general sense of what each role can do.  This applies to both the free and the self-hosted version defaults.

Alright, that’s a good question @michellefontaine

I will take you through three ways, each way has its own difficulty level, pros and cons.

Way #1 the easy way

I call it the easy way, because it doesn’t require any technical work, but more communications.

This way is useful when you don’t want to have your Guest bloggers register or have any access to your blog, so basically all what you need to have is a simply contact form or show your email somewhere on the blog so they can get in touch, they email you and attach the article with their information, and you publish it.

Way #2 user registration required

This time you want to register your users and allow them to submit their posts to the blog, so let me explain…

Here are some notes:

1. Allow registration (anyone can register), and set level to subscriber
2. Ask them to get in touch so you will get to know them (avoid spammers), then upgrade their account to contributors.
3. Contributors are allowed to submit posts as pending for review, yes they can see other posts and stuff inside WP dashboard, but they don’t have control over it, means they don’t have capability to edit, change or delete anything. (not a big deal if they can see other posts, however this will be solved only if you follow the Way #3)
4. One you get pending for review posts, and then you can check it, edit it and publish.

• (Role Manager by Thomas Schneider, which gives you control on who can do what, really useful plugin)
• (WP Status Notifier, by iDope, sends notification by email to contributors about status of their posts)
• (Peter’s Post Notes, by Peter Keung, allow editorial notes)

P.S. the plugin mentioned above are tested and recommended, I personally use them on my blog for more than 2 years now. You can find these plugin simply by search the web or WP codex.

Way #3 more advanced stuff

This way is recommended if you want to have more control of your blog, protect it from spammers, and disallow guest bloggers to get into your blog’s dashboard.

Your client will be happy with this, but it requires heavy work from your side to get everything to work together correctly.

The idea here is to use a plugin like “Gravity forms” and their nice “User Registration Add-On” plus the other plugins mention in Way #2.

Not sure if I can explain the whole thing with details, but thought to give you the main outline and explain the idea itself, so here you go:

1. Set your blog to “no one can register” (we will use gravity forms to do the job)
2. Create a form to register members.
3. Create a form to submit posts; this form will actually work on the front end, so no one can access your WP dashboard. You can set post submission to be pending for review. (It’s more advanced setup) , but Gravity forms has good support, I am sure they will help.
4. Use some plugin to limit access to dashboard for contributors.

I hope this help in any way.

Thanks again for the good question; you’ve just inspired me to expand my reply into an awesome blog post.

Wow! I am so glad I posed the question. @hesham – isn’t it great to flush out a question and end up with blog material? I’m eager to install the plugins you’ve mentioned.  @blogsbyheather – thank you for the link to the article. I don’t want to be in the habit of adding their posts to the blog, so the automated way is better, with correct moderation as editor of course.

Appreciate it!

@michellefontaine @blogsbyheather @carolinechen-whatley @kristi-hines To complement on this thread, a great post this morning on Jay Baer’s blog:
3 Tools for Managing a Killer Multi-Author Blog

Enjoy the read!

I look around for the local yokels that are in my niche and see if they want to post anything. Heck it was not long after I asked a guy to guest post on mine he started his own!