[wp-hackers] Best Practice for hooking wp_insert_post()

[Andrew Nacin]

On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 2:49 PM, Mark E <mark at simplercomputing.net> wrote:

> On 07/24/2010 08:14 AM, Mike Schinkel wrote:
>
>> Hi all:
>>
>> I'd like to ask about best practices for hooking wp_insert_post().
>> The questions are when and why to use "save_post" vs.
>> "wp_insert_post" and more importantly what's the best way to
>> determine if a post is being added or updated, or is an auto-post?
>> Actually, I'd love to have that all clarified.
>>
>
> If I remember right, auto-draft is a copy of post saved automatically while
> the WP post screen is open, and that particular save process is driven by
> Javascript.
>

Auto-drafts are new in 3.0. They're designed to prevent the need to wait for
an autosave, which is what you're describing. The moment you visit the
post-new.php screen, you now have a post ID in the form of an auto-draft.
This allows you to immediately attach media, work with custom fields,
featured images, and the like. The auto-drafts that don't turn into posts
are then cleaned up after a week or so.

Here's the ticket we managed the development of this in:
http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/11889.

It does have the side effect of triggering save_post. The post status
transition hooks are probably better to use in most cases however.