[wp-hackers] sticky for custom post types

[Mike Schinkel]

On Mar 4, 2011, at 7:35 PM, Steve Taylor wrote:
> However, I'm working on a site that has News, Projects, Insights and
> Events. For me, the best approach is to hijack Posts as News (with
> some relabelling), then have Projects, Insights and Events as custom
> post types. (I'm hacking Events so they publish even when set for the
> future, so the publish date can be used as the event date.)
> 
> On the home page is a tabbed interface showing the latest two posts of
> each type - and the client needs to be able to manually promote
> certain older posts to appear here if necessary. Surely an ideal
> situation for being able to apply the "sticky" flag to CPTs?
> 
> Of course I could have all these as post categories, but I prefer CPTs
> because having a UI for each of them *greatly* simplifies things for
> the client's editors. It's not just about having separate menu items.
> It's also that I create quite a few custom meta boxes for custom
> fields, depending on the post type. I'd have to wait until after the
> user saved a post (and remembered to select the category) to put the
> appropriate boxes in place, if I just used posts with categories.
> 
> I don't follow the logic that if CPTs appear on the home page, they
> probably should be posts. It seems anachronistic now that it's very
> common for WP to be running sites other than blogs, where the home
> page is just a list of posts. My situation - giving an overview of the
> latest of all kinds of content, with the ability to "stick" older
> stuff there to promote it - is presumably far from rare. And because
> there was refusal to even allow the option of "sticky" functionality
> for CPTs, I now have to build my own system, do a bunch of extra
> querying, etc. - or hack the core :(

I think the issue is that Custom Post Types were envisioned for use-cases that are not how you are using them; they are for things like "Products" and "Real Estate Properties" and so on; not chronology-based entries like your uses.  And I agree with that perspective.

Your uses are more like how Post Formats were envisioned for except that Post Formats can't be custom and you have need for features exposed by Custom Post Types like menu items and the metaboxes. 

What you probably really want is a "Post Class" (as I coin a new concept in this email.) A "Post Class" would let you modify the standard post_type="post" and give it custom metaboxes. Then you could use the Menu Link URLs like the following which would allow you to populate with the metaboxes you need:

Menu Link to List Insights: 
http://example.com/wp-admin/edit.php?post_class=insight

Menu Link to Add New Insight:
http://example.com/wp-admin/post-new.php?post_class=insight

You'd need to write the code to capture $_GET['post_class'] and process as desired, but that is pretty trivial.

Hope this helps.

-Mike