Content Collaboration in WordPress

Gutenberg Has Given Us Many Things

Three years ago when Gutenberg first showed up, many people worried about it and about adoption. Was it ready to roll into WordPress? Many people were unsure (including me). But what was clear, even back then, was that if Gutenberg worked, we'd be able to do lots of things that were super hard or near impossible before. Content collaboration is one of those things (which is part of why I've been all in, all this year).

The trick, whenever you're building something new, goes like this:

1. Make the hard things easy.
2. Keep the easy things easy.

And I think Gutenberg, three years later, has been doing that. Especially for people who have wanted to collaborate on blog posts like you would if you were doing it with Google Docs.

Move Over Google Docs

Maybe you've never heard of multicollab. It's a free WordPress plugin for Google Doc-style content collaboration.

I remember the first time I tried to write a blog post with another person. It was horrible. So bad that we moved to Google Docs and did it there, and then I cut and pasted the content into WordPress.

Today you don't have to do that.

The last two years have distributed our teams far and wide. And that has meant, as it always had in distributed teams, multiple time zones. So async has been something people have learned to adopt.

Working asynchronously means one person writing, another editing, another editing, another resolving items, and finally someone publishing – rarely in real time.

Until now, you'd do that in Google Docs. But with multicollab, content collaboration is powered by WordPress and Gutenberg.

Taking It For a Spin

Before I write any post, or recommend a plugin (free or premium) to anyone, I like to take it out for a spin. Try it out. See what it can do for me.

That's what I did with the free version of multicollab.

It was awesome.

• I could comment on any text directly inline like I would in Google Docs.
• I could tag specific others in my comments and assign it to them.
• I could reply to their comments (on my comments).

And then the thought occurred to me – one of my favorite features is “suggestion mode.” I like doing that when I'm collaborating with someone else because it keeps what was there and shows them what I changed.

So I thought, I should send the team a note to tell them that they should work on this new feature. It's me being helpful. And I'm sure they'd love my feedback.

So I went to their site to find the contact form and write them. That's when I saw Premium in the top nav. And Pricing. And I clicked.

Guess what? They already have Suggestion Mode.

It's not in their Plus Plan, but there it is, looking right at me in their Pro Plan.

Content Collaboration is Now Easy

I edit documents on a daily basis. I'm rarely writing long documents with other people, but I'm pulled into a variety of content to answer questions. Marketing content, support content, product pages, pricing pages, and so much more. Content is everywhere and making sure it's accurate is critical.

And what do we do when it's content collaboration on website content? Move it into Google Docs, Word, Excel, or Sheets so we can collaborate, edit and comment on it.

Now you don't need to. If the content is going to live online, you can do the multi-author content collaboration within WordPress.

Using multicollab. Check it out.