Adding Guest Post

[ROY]

Hi all,

Is there a way for me to invite guest post’s where they can draft and submit their posts for Editorial review. I know we can invite Contributors but we would need to give them access to the Ghost admin. Is there another way?

[mjw]

Honestly, there is no problem using the Contributor account. The user can only access their posts in Ghost admin, and don’t see the sidebar, either. I have many contributors, and when the relationship is over, I keep the account, but reset the password.

Note that contributors can’t publish, but their profile, name, and posts, etc. integrate really well with themes.

If you really don’t want them to have access, then create the contributor yourself, and publish from that account.

[ROY]

Greetings @mjw, I appreciate your response. I attempted to explore this feature by inviting myself with an unrelated email address as a contributor. However, I noticed that the ‘contributor’ has access to a significant portion of the admin dashboard, which isn’t ideal for my intended use.

Also, I would like to know more about this:

@mjw

If you really don’t want them to have access, then create the contributor yourself, and publish from that account.

Are you suggesting that I create distinct email accounts for contributors and add them to the platform myself?

[Cathy_Sarisky]

Roy, contributors have nothing except the ability to edit their own posts and start a new post. The whole left side menu of the dashboard is gone. If that wasn’t your experience, you might want to check that you were /actually/ logged in as a contributor, and not as yourself. (It’s an easy mistake to make!)

@ROY

Are you suggesting that I create distinct email accounts for contributors and add them to the platform myself?

If you have gmail, you can add +something to your existing address, and it’ll drop into your regular inbox. That makes it really easy to make lots of accounts.

So if your email were roy@gmail.com, then you could make roy+susansmith@gmail.com and roy+samanthajones@gmail.com and so on.

You could also use this recently-posted trick:

Creating new authors

Using the Universal Import, you can upload placeholder authors via JSON. The import doesn’t generate emails and the account doesn’t need to be accepted by anyone so you can use anything that validates as an email address here. You can then edit the email, slug, name and role for one of these placeholders from inside admin each time you want to issue an author account to a real person. They’ll need to do a password reset from /ghost/#/signin to start using the login if that’s what they’re going …

[mjw]

@ROY

However, I noticed that the ‘contributor’ has access to a significant portion of the admin dashboard, which isn’t ideal for my intended use.

Most likely, you used the same browser, and hadn’t cleared the cache. As I said, the contibutor only has access to their posts.

@ROY

Are you suggesting that I create distinct email accounts for contributors …

You can do this. Use a plus address or a service such as SimpleLogin.

[ROY]

Hi @Cathy_Sarisky Thank you for your response.

I prefer the idea of creating an email address in the format of name+writer1@gmail.com. However, I’m unsure how to grant them access to the writing platform where they can compose and save their articles.

[Cathy_Sarisky]

Roy, I just noticed I never replied to you. In the case where you WANT them to log in, then you’d use THEIR email which will send THEM an invite to join, so that they can log themselves in. My proposal from earlier (to make accounts using your own personal Gmail) was about trying to avoid giving them actual access, while being able to attribute articles to them. So two options:

1. Make contributor accounts that you control, using your own email address (and probably the + trick). Do all the creating of posts yourself.

2. Invite contributors to be staff users on Ghost, using their own email addresses. This lets them create the articles (but not publish them).

[ROY]

Hi @Cathy_Sarisky Thank you for your response.

The gmail trick will certainly help. I could ask them to draft their posts in google docs and then send it to me. But then I won’t be able to send real guest posters email newsletters, because all of the published posts and newsletters will go to my author+writer gmail accounts, right?

[Cathy_Sarisky]

You’re confusing staff users and website members, @roy. Emailed newsletters go to members, who sign up on the front of your website. Staff users sign in when they access /ghost/.

Staff users can absolutely have members accounts also. (And in this case, probably with different email addresses.)