NewsPortal Manager

A custom WordPress plugin that turns a standard WordPress installation into a frontend-driven news publishing workflow. It provides registration, role-aware dashboards, reporter submissions, editorial moderation, notifications and lightweight traffic/post analytics without requiring reporters or subscribers to work inside the normal WordPress admin interface.

Feature Overview

Frontend Accounts

• AJAX-based user registration
• WordPress nonce validation on registration requests
• Automatic WordPress authentication after successful registration
• Frontend logout flow
• WordPress admin bar hidden from non-administrators on the frontend

Role-Aware Dashboard

The [my_custom_dashboard] shortcode renders a dashboard based on the current user's WordPress role.

• Administrator — editorial queue, moderation controls and analytics
• Reporter — news submission, publishing status and author statistics
• Subscriber — account/activity-oriented notifications

Reporter Publishing Workflow

Reporters can submit news from the frontend with:

• Title
• Category
• Tags
• Featured image
• Rich-text article body

Submissions use a WordPress nonce and integrate with the normal WordPress post model. The dashboard tracks pending/published content and provides the editorial side with moderation controls.

Editorial Controls

Administrators can work from the frontend dashboard to:

• Review pending posts
• Open previews
• Open a post for editing
• Publish or trash submissions
• Review pending comments
• Approve or delete comments

Notifications

The plugin builds role-specific activity notifications from WordPress data, including events such as:

• New pending posts for administrators
• Comment activity
• Reporter posts becoming live
• Replies to a reporter's comments
• Subscriber comment approvals
• Recently published posts

Analytics

• Daily visitor counts stored in WordPress options
• Weekly and monthly site-visit summaries
• Per-post view counters
• Reporter total-view calculations
• Highest-performing post statistics

Authentication Flow

Registration requests are sent to WordPress AJAX with a custom_reg_nonce. The server validates the nonce, sanitizes the username/email, checks for existing accounts, creates the user through wp_insert_user(), then establishes the normal WordPress logged-in session using wp_set_current_user() and wp_set_auth_cookie().

The plugin therefore relies on WordPress authentication cookies and the WordPress user system rather than implementing a separate token/JWT authentication layer.

Dashboard Flow

Visitor
  │
  ├─ Register / authenticate through WordPress
  │
  ▼
[my_custom_dashboard]
  │
  ├─ Administrator → pending posts + comments + analytics
  ├─ Reporter      → submit news + track posts + analytics
  └─ Subscriber    → account/activity notifications

Project Structure

news-portal-manager/
├── custom-dashboard-pro.php
├── README.md
└── assets/
    ├── css/
    │   └── custom-styles.css
    └── js/
        └── custom-scripts.js

Technical Stack

• WordPress users and roles
• WordPress authentication cookies
• WordPress AJAX API
• Nonces
• Posts, comments and metadata APIs
• WP_Query
• Shortcodes
• PHP
• jQuery / JavaScript
• CSS

Installation

1. Download or clone this repository into wp-content/plugins/.
2. Activate NewsPortal Manager from WordPress.
3. Add [my_custom_dashboard] to the page intended to host the frontend dashboard.
4. Configure the surrounding WordPress pages/theme for the site's registration and news experience.

Portfolio Note

This project demonstrates a multi-role frontend WordPress application rather than a conventional admin-only plugin: account creation, editorial workflow, content submission, moderation, notifications and analytics are coordinated through WordPress core APIs while exposing the operational workflow on the frontend.

Author

Sajjadur Rahaman Shawon
GitHub: https://github.com/shawonshajjad