How to Invite and Manage Contributors

With the Manage Contributors feature in Spokal, other people can now write blog posts for you and submit them for your approval.

Please follow the steps below or watch the tutorial video to get started.

Inviting Contributors

1. Login to your Spokal Account and from your Dashboard navigate to Account > Manage Contributors
2. Click on the ‘Invite A New Contributor’ button

3. Enter the contributor’s Name, Last Name and Email address in the required fields
4. (Optional) You can add a note about the person you’re inviting and this will only be visible to you in the table next to their name
5. Click on ‘Next’

6. Here you can choose the default author name for the posts that the contributor creates by either selecting one from the list of your existing WordPress users or you can choose to create a new WordPress user

NOTE: You can always change the name of the author when you’re creating or editing a post in Spokal. Click on the WordPress tab on the right side of the editor and then select the link ‘I want to publish as another author’. Choose an author from the list and their name will appear on your site when you publish the post.

Click on the drop down menu to select an existing WordPress user and then click on ‘Invite This Person To Spokal’

To create a new WordPress user, click on the green button next to the drop down menu from the previous step and when you enter a new username for the contributor, hit ‘Create’

After that, you will see a message that the invitation was sent and the contributor will receive an email with instructions on how to set up an account and how to use the Spokal editor.The name of the invited contributor will be added to the table above and their status will be pending until they confirm the invitation.

Contributors

With the created account, contributors only have access to the Spokal editor and can use most of the features for creating their posts. They can only save drafts and submit their posts for your approval, but note that they cannot see or manage anything in your account.

Managing the Submitted Posts

When they submit their posts, you will see a notification on the right hand side of your Dashboard and in the notifications tab at the top right. To review the submitted post, you can either follow the link from one of the notifications or click on the Blog menu item on your left and then select Contributor Posts.

From this page you can approve or reject submitted posts by clicking on the icons under the ‘Actions’ column. Hover over them to see what each one is for. You can also open the post for editing and then save as draft, schedule or publish it.

Approved posts are transferred to My Blog Posts page and you can manage them from there.

For every approved, rejected, scheduled or published post, the contributor will receive an email notifying him about these actions. For example, if a post is scheduled, they will be notified about the time and date when their post is scheduled to be published. If a post is rejected, they will be notified about it and asked to make some changes and submit the post again.

Disabling Contributor’s Account

If you want to disable a contributor from submitting any more posts to you, you can do that from the Manage Contributors page.

Click on the check mark under the Status column next to their name and they will not be able to create posts or log in to the Spokal editor.