Best Free WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugins

If you run an editorial team, or prefer to keep a firm schedule when creating and publishing content, then you’re going to need an editorial calendar. With WordPress, it’s possible to have such a tool. In this article, you’ll learn about some of the best WordPress editorial calendar plugins online, as well as a few tips to help you use it.

An editorial calendar is a tool designed to help writers streamline their workflow. While individual bloggers can use an editorial calendar, they are especially perfect for a content team that consists of writers and editors. Editors can schedule and task writers some topics to handle, as well when they want to publish the article.

Whether you’re writing solo or on a team, an editorial calendar keeps you on task. You plan out what you want to write, and when you’d like to publish it. It’s a means of holding you accountable, especially if you have a hard time blogging regularly. For editors, an editorial calendar can get an overview of all of the tasks, and check in with writers in order to see how things are progressing.

In WordPress, having an editorial calendar available to both the writers and editorials makes it easy for everyone to access it, and to be on the same page about their tasks. If you publish all sorts of content, from video, regular articles, or podcasting, you can use an editorial calendar to balance your content schedule out.

When it comes to what makes a WordPress editorial calendar plugin good, here are some features to look for:

• Has a calendar overview of content.
• Allows multiple users to access.
• Provides content notifications.
• Ability to create custom statuses.
• Room for editorial comments.
• Provide reminder notifications.

Has a calendar overview of content.

The calendar overview is a great tool for any editorial team. This allows you to plan out your content each month, and make sure you’re not overlapping tasks or doing more of one type of content.

Allows multiple users to access.

When you run a news site or a blog that has multiple authors, allowing multiple users and user-roles, allows the editor or blog owner to be more organized with assigning, reviewing, and publishing.

Provides content notifications.

When the website’s editor assigns a task, it’s nice to receive a notice, so you can get racking on writing a post.

Ability to create custom statuses.

Not every editorial calendar has this, but if you can create custom statuses, then this will help visualize the project workflow better. Better yet, if you can use different colors for those statuses, it makes things a lot more organized.

Room for editorial comments.

When you’ve got a team of writers and editors, having an editorial calendar that permits comments between both can eliminate waiting for emailing back and forth.

Provide reminder notifications.

It’s okay to forget sometimes, but if you’re on a tight schedule, a WordPress editorial calendar plugin that provides reminders, is super helpful.

1. CoSchedule
2. Editorial Calendar
3. Nelio Content
4. Oasis Workflow
5. PublishPress
6. SchedulePress

1. CoSchedule

CoSchedule is free to download, but in order to use it, you need an account with CoSchedule. They have a free forever marketing calendar plan that you can plan projects and monitor the progress of them. You can even connect your CMS through CoSchedule to publish content to social network sites. Their interface is colorful, so you can differentiate between tasks and notices.

2. Editorial Calendar

The Editorial Calendar displays an overview of posts you published, as well as scheduled them out. This plugin does allow you to work with multiple authors. If you want to change the date of your post, you can even drag and drop them within the calendar interface. If you’re not looking for a lot of frills, Editorial Calendar will do the job, and above all, it’s entirely free.

3. Nelio Content

Nelio Content is a WordPress editorial calendar plugin that gives you the ability to create content, schedule it, and even promote it. The free version of Nelio Content includes:

• Integration to auto-publish to 1 username per social network
• Full editorial calendar
• Built-in analytics

If you want more features and things like editorial comments, editorial tasks, and auto-sharing old content, the premium version of Nelio Content can be bought for as low as $5 per month.

4. Oasis Workflow

Oasis Workflow offers a drag and drop calendar interface where you can manage multiple users. You can assign tasks, as well as mark them for review or publish posts. Users can track their progress and sign off on tasks when they’ve completed them.

For as low as $119 per year, you can purchase Oasis Workflow Pro and have access to features like:

Auto-submitting workflow Revisions on published content Compatibility with Oasis Workflow add-ons

5. PublishPress

PublishPress editorial calendar gives you the tools to be able to collaborate between editors and writers, in order to get tasks completed. The calendar overview itself has drag and drop functionality, so you can move tasks around with ease. You also can receive notifications, leave comments to your editorial team, and create custom statuses.

If your team uses Slack, then PublishPress has an integration for that in their pro version, which is about $69 per year.

6. SchedulePress

SchedulePress is probably one of the most beautiful editorial calendars in the WordPress market. While it’s pretty, it a robust WordPress editorial calendar plugin jam packed with features:

• Auto-share to social networks
• Schedule posts in advance
• Dashboard widget for your WordPress admin
• Drag and drop editorial calendar
• Ability to manage multiple authors
• Notify WordPress users via email
• Compatibility with Elementor

You can get access to more features and even plugin support with their SchedulePress pro version, which usually runs about $49 per year.

After learning all of this, does an editorial calendar seem like something that could be of use when planning your blog posts? If so, install any of the WordPress editorial calendar plugins in this article and see which one suits your needs the best. Good luck and happy blogging!