[wp-hackers] Intervening in $posts and hidden categories

[Matt Mullenweg]

ayj & j wrote:

> So to return to the more general case - wp-blog-header deals very well with
> a multitude of possible page request types (eg author requests, date
> requests, category requests) which one does not want to modify / repeat for
> a special purpose plugins. So it might help to be able to have the ability
> to intervene in wp-blog-header by some system of hooks / filters / actions,
> particularly those that might influence the database query string.

I think Ryan's suggestion of the two additional filter hooks (on the query 
and the resulting object array) are excellent. Just as a matter of 
implementation, however, I think it makes sense for a sticky-post type 
plugin to utilize the category infrastructure. Then in your plugin file 
you could get the ID of the sticky category and add a simple $cat = -123; 
to your plugin file to exclude that category from the main loop. With 
regards to interface, I think checking and unchecking a category is much 
easier than putting a specified value in a custom field and then deleting 
it later.

This brings us to something that has been discussed before, hidden 
categories. Someone had suggested that categories that begin with a 
period, like .sticky, should be suppressed from view in the category 
listing, like "hidden" dot files in linux. This seems like an excellent 
idea to me. Any comments?

-- 
Matt Mullenweg
  http://photomatt.net | http://wordpress.org
http://pingomatic.com | more soon...