Build a WordPress Guest Post Plugin: Frontend Submission + Admin Approval

Most WordPress guest post plugins either bloat your site or quietly let strangers publish. In this build we write our own: a front-end submission form, a proper moderation queue in wp-admin, and a security model that treats every submitted byte as hostile. By the end you'll have a working plugin and — more importantly — you'll understand why each piece is written the way it is. Nonces, kses, capabilities, file upload validation, Post/Redirect/Get, conditional asset loading. The stuff that separates a plugin that works from a plugin that's safe. 🧠 AI used: Claude (https://claude.ai) 💻 Code editor: Sublime Text 🌐 Local server: WampServer ──────────────────────────── 🔗 LINKS & RESOURCES ──────────────────────────── 📦 Plugin source code (GitHub): https://github.com/ajeetsinghbaddan/w... ⬇️ WordPress download: https://wordpress.org/download/ ⬇️ WampServer download: https://www.wampserver.com/en/ ⚙️ Microsoft Visual C++ packages for WampServer: https://wampserver.aviatechno.net/ ✏️ Sublime Text editor: https://www.sublimetext.com/ 🤖 Claude AI: https://claude.ai ──────────────────────────── ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS ──────────────────────────── 00:00 — Intro: building a WordPress Guest Post Submissions plugin 00:43 — The first Claude prompt 02:17 — Installing & activating the plugin 05:30 — Final testing 10:35 — Wrap-up & thoughts ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🔧 WHAT'S COVERED ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ How to accept content from logged-out users without opening a hole The three checks every admin action needs: capability, nonce, ownership Why WP_List_Table beats hand-rolling an admin table How to validate file uploads properly (magic bytes, not file extensions) Loading CSS/JS only on pages that need it Making a plugin extensible with actions and filters Got stuck? Comment with your theme name and I'll help. 👍 If this helped, like & subscribe for more WordPress development tutorials! #WordPress #WordPressDevelopment #PHP #WebDevelopment #guestposting