[wp-hackers] Best practice for early access of post data

[Claude Needham]

I am trying to customer the look in a theme for different "sections"
of the website.
Each section is defined by a set of categories.

In order to make this work I was going to add a class to the wrapper div

But this means accessing information from the post(s) earlier than the
loop is typically invoked.

Is there a proper way to get a peek at the data from the post(s)
without messing up the loop -- and who knows how many plugins and
filters?

Thanks in advance for any clues.

Regards,
Claude Needham