Question

A WP user with the role “Author” can post articles. On the blog in question I have the requirement, that these users’ articles have to be live immediately but not publicly visible (i.e., for anonymous visitors or Subscribers). We use WP 3.0.5.

We already have a plugin running, that allows to hide categories from anonymous and Subscribers. So the most straight-forward method I came up with so far is: New blog posts by Authors should be automatically put in a category. Then I hide that category from anonymous users.

Does anyone know:

a) how to automatically put an article by “Author” users in a certain category, or

b) how the requirement “live but not public” could be achieved more elegantly for those posts?

(Plugin suggestions are welcome, too.)

Answer 1

What you probably want to do is write function to do this in your theme’s functions.php file, and then use add_action to trigger that function when a post is saved.

For example:

function update_category_on_save($post_id) {
    // Get post
    $post = wp_get_single_post($post_id)
    // Map author IDs to category IDs
    $mapping = array(
        1 => array(123),
        2 => array(234),
    );
    // Update the post
    $new_category = $mapping[$post->post_author];
    $u_post = array();
    $u_post['ID'] = $post_id;
    $u_post['post_category'] = $new_category;
    // Only update if category changed
    if($post->post_category != $new_category[0]) {
        wp_update_post($u_post);
    }
}

add_action('category_save_pre', 'update_category_on_save');

Hope that makes sense, and gives you a hint as to how to do this — I’m afraid I haven’t been able to test it.