Howdy! it’s Blogano
Most WordPress sites go quiet after launch. Not because nobody has anything to say — because publishing is enough friction that it never reaches the top of anyone’s list. The people with something worth posting are rarely the people with a WordPress login, and the ones who have a login are busy.
The usual fix is to give more people access to the dashboard. That fix has never been good. WordPress’s Contributor role still drops people into wp-admin, which is confusing for anyone who doesn’t already know WordPress and risky if they do. Front-end posting plugins tended to be abandoned, paywalled at the first useful feature, or so opinionated about styling that they fought whatever theme you were using.
So Blogano got built to do that one job properly: a submission form that lives on your site, an editorial queue you control, and a feed that matches your design without anyone writing CSS. Contributors paste a link or write a post, you approve it, it appears. Nobody but you ever sees the dashboard.
Who those contributors are is up to you. Guest writers on a magazine. Staff across a company who each know one thing worth saying. A sales team…
Why it’s free
Blogano is released under the GPL with no paid tier. Every feature is in the download.
That’s a deliberate choice rather than a launch promotion. A plugin with a free tier is under constant pressure to make the free version worse, and the features that get held back are usually the ones that make it genuinely useful. Removing the paid tier removes that pressure.
If Blogano ever needs a business model, it’ll be something alongside the plugin rather than carved out of it — and the version you already installed will keep working.
Who Maintains It
Across thirty years in marketing and hundreds of web projects, I saw the same problem repeat: businesses invested in great websites, only for them to stall after launch.
Small organizations suffered most. Lacking dedicated web teams, they struggled with traditional CMS platforms that required backend training. The people with valuable insights—experts, leaders, and frontline staff—had no easy way to publish.
Blogano solves this friction, turning posting from a multi-hour chore into a one-minute task for people whose main job isn’t site management.
Mo Gabel, Creator of Blogano
How to reach me: Bug reports and support questions should go through our Support Section or User’s Manual. For anything else, reach out at info@blogano.com—if you’ve built something with Blogano, I’d love to see it.
Built on other people’s work
Blogano isn’t written from nothing. Three open source projects do jobs inside it that would each have been months of work to do badly, and they’re all MIT licensed — free to use, including commercially.
Optional external services
Two features connect to Google if you choose to switch them on. Both are off by default, and Blogano works fully without either. No other external service is contacted. Blogano has no telemetry, sends no usage data, and does not phone home.
Bootstrap Icons supplies every icon in the interface: the pins, the pencils, the search magnifier, the power button. They’re embedded directly in the page rather than loaded as a font, so nothing is fetched from anyone else’s server.
Bootstrap Icons — © The Bootstrap Authors.
Spectrum is the colour picker throughout the settings — every colour field, the palette of recently used colours, and the Clear button that hands a colour back to your theme.
Spectrum Colorpicker v1.8.1 — © Brian Grinstead.
Summernote is the editor you write articles in. Toolbar, formatting, tables, code view, the lot. Choosing it over WordPress’s own editor was deliberate: Summernote handles images and video embeds better on the front end, which is where Blogano lives.
Summernote v0.9.0 — © 2013 Hackerwins and contributors.
Blogano also uses jQuery, which ships with WordPress itself rather than being bundled here.
reCAPTCHA protects the registration and submission forms, and only loads if you enter your own keys.
The YouTube Data API fills in a video’s description when someone submits a YouTube link, and only runs if you supply an API key. Without one, titles and thumbnails still work.