[wp-hackers] Structured Blogging - getting extra plugin hooks inserted in the WP code

[Phillip Pearson]

Hi all,

I'm Phil from Broadband Mechanics.  We've recently been working on 
updating PubSub's Structured Blogging plugin to publish more content 
types and support open standards - microformats, media RSS, etc.

The SB plugin adds in a bunch of new items into the "Write" menu:

    Review
    Event
    List
    Audio
    Video
    People Showcase
    Group Showcase
    Other Microcontent

Other Microcontent takes you to a full list of supported microcontent, 
Review, Event and List take you to a further menu to select what type of 
review/event/list you want to publish, and the others take you directly 
to edit forms.

The reason I'm writing here is that to change the editing interface this 
extensively, we had to step outside the plugin API.  We've copied 
post.php to sb-post-common.php and edit-form.php to sb-edit-form.php, 
made our changes in there, and used them when publishing the new post 
types.  This isn't much fun, as it means we need to track post.php and 
edit-form.php and release a new version whenever anything important happens.

That said, I checked out a copy of Wordpress from Subversion last night, 
installed the current plugin code, and it worked fine, so it's not 
*that* incompatible, but we would be *much* happier using the plugin API.

I've been over the code and I think what we'd need is:

- the ability to change where post.php redirects to after a post is 
published.

- do_action() calls before and after the edit form (or maybe just the 
'description' field) is displayed - so we could use ob_start() and 
ob_end_clean() to cut out the edit form and display our own form in its 
place.

- the ability to change the 'Write Post' heading into something else.

If we submit a patch to add plugin API hooks to do these things, is 
there a chance of having it considered for WP1.6?

Cheers,
Phil :-)