The 5 best editorial calendar plugins for WordPress

Getting up and running with a successful blog nowadays is not an easy task. First you need to find a theme for your content, a niche you are interested in an knowledgeable at, then you need some intriguing post ideas, then the difficult part of coming up with engaging (although hopefully non click-baity) titles and writing up easy to read content. Once done you need to properly promote your posts on various social media platforms in order to drive traffic to your site and hopefully have some people read them.

A very useful tool that can make this process a bit easier, more streamlined and also help you maintain a consistent posting schedule, which is also very important to keep up reader engagement on your site, is an editorial calendar. These can help you with content planning, editing drafts, reviewing finished content and finally publishing the posts at a set, consistent schedule. That helps take some of the weight of, ease the grind and allow you to focus more on writing content that your audience wants to read.

WordPress users are lucky to have at their disposal a lot of editorial/content calendar plugins. Plugins come in varying degrees of complexity depending on now much help you actually need on your site. Below we have a collection of the five best content calendar plugins for your WordPress site.

Strive Content Calendar

Strive is a new plugin that adds a content calendar directly into your WordPress dashboard. Using the calendar, you can quickly visualize and edit your publishing schedule. Create new posts, insert drafts, and reschedule posts with simple drag-and-drop.

In addition to the editorial calendar, Strive includes a variety of practical tools for content creators. Posts in the calendar are color-coded based on their status, which you can update for any post right inside the post editor. There are also custom checklists so you can create a predefined process and check off items while you write.

If you are interested in getting more search traffic to your site, you’ll appreciate the revision feature too, which lets you create revisions of existing posts and schedule their republication.

• Visualize your schedule with the content calendar
• Manage posts with statuses
• Create custom checklists
• Republish posts with revisions
• Get an overview with the Pipeline

Editorial Calendar

The Editorial Calendar is a free WordPress editorial calendar plugin. Once activated it will give you a calendar overview of your blog so you can see what posts are schedule and when they will go live. In the calendar you can drag & drop to move the posts, edit them and easily manage your blog from a single view.

Some of the plugin’s key features are:

• Calendar overview of post publish dates
• Drag & drop publish date rearrangement
• Quick edit posts from the calendar view
• Publish or manage drafts
• Manage posts from multiple authors on multi-author blogs

CoSchedule

CoSchedule is a SaaS marketing calendar with great WordPress integration via the provided plugin. It essentially is a content calendar and a social media marketing calendar fused into one. It will allow you not only to schedule and publish content on your site, but will greatly help with marketing efforts on all the important channels. The plugin is ideal for solo writers, small businesses, companies with in-house marketing teams and more.

Some key features of the marketing calendar are:

•  Overview of post scheduling to ensure you are working on the right priorities
• Share progress with your team or higher ups
• See the effect the marketing you do has on your posts
• Easy rescheduling of post publishing dates with drag & drop

PublishPress: Editorial Calendar, Workflow, Comments, Notifications and Statuses

PublishPress: Editorial Calendar, Workflow, Comments, Notifications and Statuses is another free content calendar plugin for WordPress. The plugin will offer you a calendar like overview of your publishing schedule. By default it will display all the planned content for the next six weeks with filters available to help you narrow down what you want to work on. Rescheduling for unpublished content can be done via a simple drag & drop. Content can be created right in the calendar, and subscription to calendars are available through iCal or Google calendar. The plugin offers a pro version as well with some extra features such as Slack integration, reminder notifications whitelabeling and more.

Some key plugin features are:

• Calendar like overview of the publishing schedule
• Drag & drop rescheduling
• Calendar view filters
• Custom post statuses
• Editorial comments

Oasis Workflow

Oasis Workflow is our final plugin in our list. It is a free content calendar plugin designed to automate any editorial workflow process using a simple, intuitive drag and drop interface. The plugin specializes on facilitating workflows to improve content review and publication processes, this makes it ideal for multiauthor WordPress websites, industries with regular content output in need of formal review processes and industries where strict auditing requirements need to be met. The plugin also offers a pro version with some advanced features such as published content revisions, auto submit and more.

Some key plugin features are:

• Drag & drop visual workflow designer
• Role-based routing for task assignment
• Inbox for assignments and tasks
• Custom editorial statuses
• Process history

Wrapping up

That was our selection of the 5 best content calendar plugins for WordPress. Hopefully one of them can help you with your post publishing workflow on your WordPress blog, allow you to write better content, while keeping a consistent schedule and help drive your audience numbers and engagement up. Are you already using a content calendar plugin? If so what’s your opinion about them, did they help you? Let us know in the comments below.