Luthiery Laboratories

WordPress is primarily a blogger, and its favorite thing in the world to do is spit out your blog posts in descending order by date. But it doesn't want to do that for pages or anything else.

So I hacked the archive template, and made it recognize a 'pseudo-category' called 'recent-pages '. I say it is a pseudo-category because although it is set up like any other category, there is no point in assigning pages to it. Instead, if the WordPress database engine runs across it, it abandons the default query and instead uses one based on descending 'modified_date' for only pages. The final part was getting the pseudo-category to auto-generate. Now, if it is missing or deleted, it magically re-spawns.

Having worked out the details, I could make other pseudo-categories, but I looked over the posts table, and I don't see a need for anything else. My first go at this was very hackish, but I have now done it the right way, and it paginates. In the process, I also gathered up all the pre_get_posts() logic in one place where I can manage it. Before, there was no telling what might happen, it depended a lot on the (unknown) order that WordPress executed the various pieces.

Since I am also using the comments functionality as a Guest Book, I wrote a simple custom output function for that. All a lot of nice improvements to WordPress. I'm giving myself another one of these: