How to Enable Editorial Commenting in WordPress

Editorial comments are feedback and suggestions from various professionals on a piece of content to ensure it fulfills the intent behind its creation.

Reviewers, clients, managers, and other stakeholders are often requested to give editorial comments after the content is drafted. This improves the content by:

1. Ensuring it is search engine-friendly
2. Fixing grammatical and spelling errors
3. Making the content piece comprehensive
4. Keeping the content true to its purpose

The editorial commenting phase is unskippable if you want to produce quality content that lives up to its intent. Let’s take a look at what editorial commenting for WordPress content development teams looks like.

Ironically, WordPress editorial commenting takes place outside the WordPress editor. WordPress content teams rely on third-party content collaboration applications to make their editorial process smooth.

But are they as good as advertised?

The pros and cons of third-party content editing apps

Tools like Google Docs and Microsoft Office help WordPress content development team members collaborate asynchronously and share feedback.

The most used features are commenting, suggesting, and tagging. They help collaborators share feedback asynchronously during the WordPress editorial process. This feature makes the editorial process simpler even when the members of a team are working from different locations.

However, there are certain disadvantages associated with using third-party content editing apps:

1. Security of organizational data: Content teams have to share entire folders with clients and reviewers during the editorial process and give unrestricted access to their organizational data to third parties.
2. Reviewing dynamic content: CTA boxes, image carousels, etc., cannot be reviewed in these apps as they are not blog editors. This means content teams have to rely on email and video conferencing apps like Zoom and MS Teams to review them.
3. The back-and-forth of content in the editorial process: Content has to be moved from these apps to the blog editor which requires reformatting, to say the least. Any last-minute edits mean the cycle has to repeat itself.
4. Lengthy WordPress editorial workflow: With extra tools and steps, the WordPress collaborative editing process becomes tedious and time-consuming. This slows down the content production process significantly.

The above challenges slow down the rate of content development while affecting the quality of the content. Furthermore, the teams could get frustrated as the review cycles in the editorial process are long.

Fortunately, WordPress promised a solution for this.

When is Gutenberg Phase 3 hitting the shelves?

Gutenberg Phase 3 refers to the third iteration of the Gutenberg Editor which facilitates Google Docs-style collaboration in WordPress.

Here are the advantages it brings:

1. Gutenberg is a blog editor, which means you can get and give feedback on dynamic elements via WordPress editorial commenting.
2. It simplifies the WordPress editorial workflow by eliminating the back-and-forth of content and third-party editorial tools.
3. The biggest advantage of the promised Gutenberg Phase 3 is that it keeps the organizational data secure.

This means WordPress content developing teams can enjoy all the benefits of Google Docs (and similar apps) without the disadvantages mentioned in the previous section.

But, when is it going to be released?

Initial reports say that its development will begin in late 2021. However, WordPress is yet to make an announcement about Gutenberg. As a result, content development teams are stuck with third-party content editing apps and deal with the challenges that they bring.

Fortunately, there is a solution to this.

You can enable editorial commenting in WordPress now!

Enable editorial commenting in WordPress with Multicollab

With Multicollab, you don’t have to wait for WordPress’ announcement about the promised Gutenberg Phase 3 and can make your content development process robust and efficient through WordPress editorial commenting.

Comment, suggest changes, and tag collaborators

Multicollab shifts your entire editorial process to WordPress. Reviewers, clients, authors, managers, and stakeholders can tag each other to share personalized feedback on content. 

The best part is, if you are used to Google Docs or any third-party content editing app, there is zero learning curve.

Take a look at how simple it is:

Not just text, you can also share feedback on multimedia content. The advantage of Multicollab here is that you can also share feedback on videos, something that isn’t possible in any third-party content editing docs.

As a result, you can skip the lengthy screen-sharing video calls and long email chains while approving a video for publication.

Collaborate on dynamic content

Image sliders, sign-up forms, CTA buttons, etc., make a web page more engaging and enable the owner to deliver a personalized experience to the visitor. These dynamic content blocks are becoming increasingly common.

As mentioned above, these cannot be edited in third-party content editing apps because they simply aren’t blog editors. 

This poses a challenge, as teams have to rely on long email chains and lengthy conference calls to get feedback. These methods are quite inefficient as:

1. You will have to spend more resources in terms of time and labor.
2. It will be challenging to find past feedback quickly which increases the chances of repeating mistakes.
3. Due to the above two reasons, there will be more review cycles. Consequently, the timelines will be dilated.

Multicollab enables WordPress editorial commenting in the Gutenberg Editor. You can get feedback on them right there:

Secure your organizational data

Multicollab secures your organizational data by providing two values by enabling editorial commenting in WordPress:

1. You won’t have to give unrestricted access to your organizational folders and files to third parties.
2. With fewer applications in the editorial workflow, you reduce the number of access points in your process.

The above two values make storing and managing data easier as you will know who has access to them at all times. Not to mention, this will make the overall process faster.

But what about security in WordPress?

Through Multicollab’s dashboard, you can manage who has access to the drafts. You can give and modify permissions with the click of a button:

Advanced features of Multicollab

Apart from all the advantages of Gutenberg Phase 3, Multicollab will come with the following advanced features soon:

1. Integrate with Slack: Get notifications when you get mentioned, replies, and other activities in a dedicated Slack channel.
2. Insert document while commenting: Share relevant documents to make your review process more comprehensive.
3. VIP support: Multicollab will resolve your issues within one business day via phone or email.
4. Advanced Dashboard: Get all the updates within seconds about comments, mentions, and other sitewide activities.
5. Multilingual support: Including English, Hindi, Chinese, French, and German.

The team at Multicollab constantly keeps an eye on the market trends and requirements of WordPress content teams and continues to add more features to make the content production process more efficient.

Wrapping up

Editorial commenting makes sure that a content piece lives up to the intent behind its creation. The process involves reviewers, clients, managers, and stakeholders sharing their feedback on the draft with the editor who makes the necessary changes to get the approval.

Ironically, WordPress content development teams use third-party content editing tools for this purpose which, apart from increasing the security risks, is slow, tedious, and lacks functionalities such as the ability to review videos and dynamic content.

Fortunately, Multicollab, a WordPress collaborative plugin makes it all possible.

WordPress editorial commenting with Multicollab allows content teams to collaborate asynchronously during the editorial process, just like in apps like Google Docs.

On top of that, Multicollab offers advanced features like Slack integration, VIP support, multilingual support, and more. In other words, you can improve your WordPress editorial workflow by cutting down the number of tools and steps in your process.

Install Multicollab and enable editorial commenting in WordPress today.