How to develop a community feature in the dashboard for multiauthor site

I run a WordPress site that has more than 300 authors. Is it possible to create some type of community in the backend (dashboard)? Ideally, a space where the authors can discuss with each other in a thread type of system, with admin news and so on. The closest thing I could find was the Admin Microblog but by reading the description, it appears very limited.

I am quite surprised that there is not much backend community type of plugins, I would have imagined that the demand for such would be rather high. Anyone knows?

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2 comments

  1. What I do for almost every site with multiple authors:

    1. Create a separate blog for meta discussions, for example meta.example.com.
    2. Use P2 as theme.
    3. Install Authenticator to allow access for members only.
    4. Install something like Inform about Content, so the members get an email whenever something new was posted. I probably wouldn’t do that for 300 members …

    You could write a dashboard widget with the newsfeed for the meta blog like the Incoming Links and make it a MU Plugin to set it active on every new blog.

    This works rather good; it requires almost no configuration, and even people with low technical skills understand it fast.

  2. Not sure of the implications, but I use a custom menu and an iframe to have an external web app in the dashboard.

    function brsfl_menu() {
        add_menu_page(
            'Fotos', 
            '<span style="color:#e57300;">Photo Gallery</span>', 
            'edit_pages', 
            'photogallery', 
            'brsfl_menu_options', 
            get_bloginfo('template_url') . '/images/fotos-icon.png'
        );
    }
    
    function brsfl_menu_options() {
      echo '<div class="wraper">';
      echo '<iframe src ="'. get_option('home') .'/slideshow/index.php" width="100%" height="700">';
      echo '</div>';
    }
    
    add_action('admin_menu', 'brsfl_menu');
    

    wp ssp snapshot