[wp-hackers] Setting custom taxonomy on the fly

[Dougal Campbell]

I'm currently working on a theme, and one of the things I wanted to do 
is to automatically set the Post Format when using an XML-RPC client. 
This isn't currently supported by the WordPress for iPhone app, for 
example, so I was trying to hack around it by looking for a string at 
the beginning of a post, something like:

   :status: Watching the game and drinking a beer. Life is good.

I was going to detect the ':status:' string, remove it from 
post_content, update the post on the fly, and set the post format.

But I keep running into roadblocks.

For one thing, in class-wp-xmlrpc-server.php, the mw_newPost() method 
doesn't do any filtering of the supplied data. This would be the ideal 
place for me to do what I want, because I could theoretically just add a 
'tax_input' key to the post data that is passed into wp_insert_post(), 
and everything would just be magic from there. I suggest adding a new 
filter after the data is compacted into the $postdata array, and before 
it is passed to wp_insert_post();

Similarly, another opportunity would be is if there was a filter in 
wp_insert_post() after parsing the args, but before the extract() is 
performed. This would give another chance to inject/alter the post data 
before it is processed.

Without a filter in one of those places, it's extremely difficult for a 
plugin or theme to set/change custom taxonomy terms on a post on the 
fly, when the post comes in via XML-RPC.

So that leaves us with just a couple of other opportunities to act: the 
'wp_insert_post_data' filter, and the 'wp_insert_post' action. With the 
filter, I can detect my sentinel string and strip it back out of the 
post, but I can't set the post_format, because we don't have a post_ID 
yet. But if we get all the way to the 'wp_insert_post' action, updating 
the post content to strip out the sentinel is a problem, because using 
wp_update_post() will in turn call wp_insert_post(), which is a 
recursive loop.

One more place where a filter would be useful is when wp_insert_post() 
checks for the $tax_input variable (which would have been included in 
the original $postarr argument passed into the function). A 'tax_input' 
filter which received the post_ID would be another chance to extend the 
ability to manipulate custom taxonomies on the fly, at post creation time.


(I've also posted this as a Trac ticket: 
http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/17156)

-- 
Dougal Campbell <dougal at gunters.org>
http://dougal.gunters.org/
http://twitter.com/dougal
http://twitual.com/