Filtering which Autors can be edited or managed by an Editor

Interesting problem 🙂
I think the approach I would take is put her in a custom editor role where instead of edit/publish/delete posts, she has equivalent capabilities for a custom post type. Same for her authors, they would be in a custom author role. Instead of writing posts, they would be writing the same custom post types. This could be setup with custom code, or by using one of the roles and capabilities plugins.

The tricky part is altering all queries so that this custom post type is part of all post queries so that their articles mix in with everyone else’s. This can be done by hooking into ‘pre_get_posts’ and adding the custom type anytime ‘post’ is found in a query. That should cover most of it, there may be other holes to patch.

The one drawback would only be evident to admins, the posts table data will be on a separate admin panel than the custom type. There may be a way to combine the tables, though I’m not sure how feasible it is. It may be as simple as altering the table query just as is done for front end pages. Or it may require a completely new table template to manage both post types at once. I just don’t know.