McNicholl Holdings

Creating a plugin for wordpress can be an extremely simple task, or altogether annoying.

I’ve recently been creating a plugin for “Featured” content on a new site that I’m pushing at the moment. Basically the plugin works like this :

• Featured Posts belong to the “Featured” Category
• Featured content can be controlled by the plugin menu in the Wordpress Admin screen (updated by Editor or Administrator)
  • This is important as you dont want to have to sift through a list of 1000 posts to see which are marked as Featured or not - Even with the filter active this can be annoying
• The Featured content can only be “Featured” if it is part of another category.
  • i.e Lets say the purpose was for books (Fiction and Non-Fiction). The Featured section might only cater for Fiction books. So the posts would be in Featured and Fiction categories. Simple.
• The admin area can state the total amount of Featured posts.

The plugin then provides functions to the template to output the featured content.

One issue I had was using query_posts to select the posts that were not featured but in the chosen category (Fiction). The plugin function :
query_posts('category_name=Fiction&category_name=-Featured')
…just wouldnt work. I tried many variations of the query_post command along with category_name only to discover that wordpress does not facilitate anything more than basic requirements when using category_name. So, I retreat to using ‘cat’ instead. Boo! Now I have to query the database to get the ids of the categories I want to query on first. Not exactly efficient. Not to mention using more memory with additional variables to accommodate this etc.

Any other annoyances that you have encountered?