Category Plugin Idea

After reassigning enough posts to categories lately (on several different blogs!) I had an idea for a plugin to speed things up. Say you have a load of posts that you quickly need to make sure are assigned to a category, it is pretty tedious to have to cycle through all the posts and check that each post you are interested in is assigned properly. You can’t speed things up by filtering by category as this would not show the posts that aren’t included – which is what you are checking for in the first place! Darn..

The default post summary view.

Also, if you find some posts that are not assigned to the correct category then you have to edit their category properties one by one. Which, taking into account the page refresh times between each update, can make this process very tedious indeed. How about if you wanted to reassign posts depending on the date added to the blog, or some other attribute. What if you wanted to be able to select multiple posts and reassign them to any other category, or remove some categories from each post. It would make life so much easier to have options on the post edit pages (or a custom page) that enabled easier management of of category posts.

I have not had a look around at the category plugins in the repository but it is more than likely there are a few already out there that have similar functionality built in. If not, then perhaps it would be a good idea to take this on as a mini project. Time permitting of course!

Just before I finish (yet) another idea is to be able to automatically limit the number of posts to a category. Say if you have a latest news category or featured category, then having too many posts added would prevent this category from only showing a select number of posts. If you had a limit then any new posts added over this limit would trigger a ‘first in’, ‘last out’ function whereby the new post added forces out the oldest post. You would have to have a check, of course, that the post was assigned to at least one other category or else it would cease to be visible on the blog! In this instance reassigning the post to the default category would make sense. Also having a post in certain categories on a time limit would be a great idea. Imagine being able to have a post automatically assigned to a category (say latest news) then after one month it is removed from this category and added to another (the default, or other category).

If a plugin combined automatic adding to one or more categories (with an option of a time limit in that category) then that would be quite powerful and certainly very useful (to me anyway). That way I could just focus on writing the post and adding it to any extra (post specific) categories manually, and be sure that it is also added to other pre-set categories on a temporary or permanent basis. As a blog administrator I have enough things to remember already..!