Front-end WordPress editing and posting capabilities make life much easier for those who are not familiar with the WordPress dashboard. Many users find it confusing and will often give up on posting content. Therefore, operating a website that depends heavily on user-generated content, such as reviews or community news, can be a formidable challenge. I’ve put together a list of plugins that will help to virtually eliminate this problem.
Post From Site
This plugin allows posting directly from the front-end. It creates a link on your website which, when clicked, will bring up a simple text-box. Users can enter a post title, content, add categories and tags, and upload images.
Download Plugin
Front-end Editor
The Front-end Editor plugin allows you to make changes to your content by double-clicking on the front-end. It’s compatible with any theme out of the box and will allow you to edit posts and pages, comments, authors, terms, widgets, theme images, and options.
Download Plugin
TDO Mini Forms
This plugin allows you to add highly customisable forms that work with your WordPress theme to your website that allows non-registered users and/or subscribers (also configurable) to submit and edit posts and pages. New posts are kept in “draft” until an admin can publish them. The plugin provides an extensive moderation view so administrators and editors can see posts and edits awaiting approval and publish or delete them.
Download Plugin
Quick Post Widget
This plugin provides a widget to post directly from the front of your site without going into the backend. It also offers visual editing in a popup window while posting from the frontend, with many features, including media uploading, spellchecking, preview, and more.
Download Plugin
Inline Editor
This plugin adds the capacity to edit your content from the front end of your WordPress blog using the styling of your blog. It uses the excellent and lightweight NicEdit WYSIWYG editor component to give you full control over the look. The main advantages over editing this way over the traditional method is that you can see your content exactly how it will appear using all the styles and formatting of your WordPress template.
Download Plugin
One Quick Post
This plugin allows users to write posts from the frontend using a shortcode in a page/post. Guest posting can be enabled, and it’s compatible with BuddyPress. It uses built-in WordPress Roles & Capabilities, so you can choose if a user can publish a post, edit it once published, delete posts, etc.
Download Plugin
FE Editor Inline
This plugin is similar to the Front-end Editor plugin. It fixes the editing window above in your browser’s left corner so that it’s always available. Above the edit panel you have an edit button that will take you to the backend editor in case you need more functionality.
Download Plugin
Gravity Forms
This plugin allows users to automatically create a post, among many other things. When added to a form, the post fields create a post when the form is submitted. It’s great for user-submitted stories, job postings, directories, etc. and comes with professional support.
Download Plugin
Combine a front-end posting plugin with a front-end editing plugin and the average user will never need to visit the dashboard at all! WordPress is a powerful CMS. Don’t let the confusing backend dashboard keep you from selecting it for your website. Grab a couple of these plugins and put your users at ease.
Nice selection indeed !
And what would be YOUR choice ?
I’ve done a LOT of R&D into this and I can state with much confidence than none of the plugins listed here are ‘quite there’ yet when it comes to giving the WP back-end the boot.
Gravity forms is the best for post/page submission but it lacks a lot of features such as page-parent selection and a decent WYSIWYG editor.
None of them are really suitable for editing posted content although in my tests “Front-end Editor” came out as the best choice. Its actual ‘editor’ however is very hit and miss.
I’m holding out for the Gravity guys to get onto this. They have a really strong team and have sold a lot of licences to users like me who constantly bring this up in the forum and support emails :)
@MKJones: Any news on this. I know that Gravity Forms has not yet rolled out a solution. Version 1.7 is rumored to have this but I fear we are still quite a ways away from seeing the launch of v1.7 gforms. being that you’ve obviously done quite a bit of research into this, have you found a solution as of yet? I’m in dire need of one. Thanks in advance. If you can’t reply to me here, feel free to find me at vegaskev in gravityhelp
One more: Posthaste.
Hi, very nice selection. Thank you.
Really do like what you have put together here, keep them coming! Have you check out Twitoaster?
I’m looking for a similar front end editor that will allow the user to select post types for their content. Anything out there that will do this currently?
Hey, I was searching for the same from quiet some time. I am working on a project where I cant give others, access to dashboard. This will surely come in handy. Thanks for this Awesome share.
Which one works with Buddypress and multi-blogs enabled..?
You’ll need to test them out individually, since they all do slightly different things.
nice plugins reviews…
thanks….
I do not even know how I ended up here, but I thought this post was great. I don’t know who you are but certainly you’re going to a famous blogger if you are not already ;) Cheers!
a new plugin worth looking at?
WordPress User Frontend
http://tareq.wedevs.com/2011/01/new-plugin-wordpress-user-frontend/
i am using this one on many sites and am very happy with it! i was surprised to see that this is not premium…
This list of plug-ins is exactly what I have been looking for during the last two weeks. I wish I could have found it earlier. Thank you for the great work!
This is what i was looking for to allow my content to be edited from front end. You save my time from coding the same plugin.
It would be really great to find an inline editor that really does do the job properly. My experiences with the Inline Editor plugin was pretty good but it stopped working when I updated my theme(or updated to a newer version of WordPress – I’m not sure which), so there appear to be some comparability issues.
I haven’t tried any of the others here yet. But I’m going to give Front-end Editor a try.
Very nice list you’ve saved me time and effort. I can recommend FV Community News plugin although one cannot add categories.
The link to Gravity is broken. FYI.
I also created one similar plugin weeks ago to do these task http://webgarb.com/wp-inline-edit/
Lol i didn’t know before that there was already awesome plugin exists :d.
Hi Sarah,
May I contribute our own front-end editing plugin to your list?
http://wp-types.com/2012/09/meet-cred-our-front-end-content-editing-plugin/
CRED builds forms for creating and editing content from from pages. Every form is associated with a post type and can include all custom fields and taxonomy.
Since CRED was built specifically for this purpose, it’s fully featured and allows you to edit anything. Practically, if you can build it with WordPress, you’ll be able to create and edit that content with CRED.
It includes access control, conditional input display, supports repeating fields, taxonomy input, input validation and more.
CRED is currently in beta and available to Views clients. We’ll be releasing it to general public in about 3 weeks.
I totally agree that front-editing is the way forward for WordPress. That’s why we’ve developed a WordPress theme that allows users to edit both content (+widgets) as well as page layout like custom headers, sidebars, footers. For those of you interested, you can download it from here: http://nexusthemes.com
Would be great to hear your feedback.