I’ve been trying to help out some with WordPress recently aside from plugin development, so I answer support questions and try to add things to the code base that I think would be useful. That’s actually where the Paged Comment Editing plugin came from to be honest. I initially proposed it as a modification to the WordPress core and the suggestion was made to package it up as a plugin. That it then became an intellectual exercise in replacing WordPress functionality from a plugin was a happy benefit, but the initial intent was to improve the core.

There’s been a comment in the WP source that’s bugged me for a long time. It says, simply:

// Note: if we have a negative, we ignore all the positives. It must
// always mean 'everything /except/ this one'. We should be able to do
// multiple negatives but we don't : -(

Maybe it was the sad-face smiley that did it, I don’t know. I’ve had a hack for multiple exclusions that I use on this site because I need two, one for the Asides and one for the Currently Reading. But it wasn’t good enough to go in the core so I constantly have to merge it in when I upgrade to new versions.

Recently I figured I’d give the real McCoy a shot and develop a flexible real solution to multiple exclusions, so that you could say “I want the Movies, Music, Games, and Design categories to show up on the front page but only if those posts aren’t also in the Asides, Baby, and Currently Reading categories.” You know, wicked, bitchin’ stuff.

After several days of wrangling, I’m hanging up my spurs. It beat me. I learned a lot about MySQL and the limitations of MySQL 4.0 and the lack of subqueries and EXISTS and temporary tables and a whole lot of crap that I hope to forget in short order. Who would have thought that it would be so damned tough?

Besides, now there’s this thing that does it better, does it in a plugin, and does it with style. Behold the power of plugins.

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