How-to Delay The Capability To Publish Posts?

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There won’t be a plugin for that, so I wrote one. You can use it as plugin or (better) a mu-plugin (place it in your ~/wp-content/mu-plugins folder).

Mu-Plugin: delay the possibility to “publish a post” by removing the MetaBox

For a detailed explanation of what happens and why it happens, please refer to the inline comments:

<?php
/**
 * Plugin Name: Delay post publishing
 * Plugin URI: http://unserkaiser.com
 * Description: Only allows publishing a post if the user registered one week ago. 
 * Version: 0.1
 * Author: Franz Josef Kaiser
 * Author URI: http://unserkaiser.com
 */

// Only run this for new "post"-post_type admin UI screens
if ( ! is_admin() AND 'post-new.php' !== $GLOBALS['typenow'] ) return;

function remove_publish_metabox_until_date() 
{
    // Retrieve the current users' data as object
    $curr_user = get_user_by( 'id', get_current_user_id() );

    // Get the time/date (and format) of the time 
    // the user registered as UNIX timestamp - needed for comparison
    $reg_date  = abs( strtotime( $curr_user->user_registered ) );
    $curr_date = abs( strtotime( current_time( 'mysql' ) ) );

    // Human readable difference: This calculates the time since the user registered
    $diff       = human_time_diff( $reg_date, $curr_date );
    $diff_array = explode( ' ', $diff );

    // Remove if we're on the 1st day (diff result is mins/hours)
    // This removes the MetaBox
    if ( 
        strstr( $diff_array[1], 'mins' )
        OR strstr( $diff_array[1], 'hours' )
    )
        return remove_meta_box( 'submitdiv', null, 'side' );

    // Remove if we're below or equal to 7 days (1 week)
    // This removes the MetaBox
    if ( 7 >= $diff_array[0] )
        return remove_meta_box( 'submitdiv', null, 'side' );
}
add_action( 'add_meta_boxes', 'remove_publish_metabox_until_date', 20 );

Further updates for this plugin can be found in this Gist.

Can also be found in the WPSE plugin repository.

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