There’s one thing about WP that has been annoying me a lot and it’s that the default category option doesn’t work (see bug # 0000182 for details). Since this is so annoying to me and the issue appears to be fairly low on the developers’ schedule; I decided to start investigating the issue myself. I found that check what you’ve set the default category to by running this SQL query against your WP database:
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name='default_category'
For a bit there, I also thought I’d figured out which function should be calling this sort of query but after a bit more digging into my options; I realized that on my test install, I’d enabled the Advanced editing controls. Bah, back to the drawing board. Well, back to the drawing board tomorrow; I’m getting too tired tonight to continue digging through WP’s code to figure out the problem any further.
Oh and for the record, I’m not the only one that is annoyed by this.
I was the one who reported that bug, based on something I read the forums, once.
To change/fix that, one would need to
a) add a new option and a button or some such in the admin interface
OR
b) hardcode cat 1 as the default.
Getting it to ignore the post by email cat setting for the posts that I write using the UI should be good enough to start with, I guess.
I will get to fixing it when I am done with other odd stuff I am working on, but if you wish to continue with finding a solutions, I hope you will find the following site useful :
http://www.cenamayo.com/wpxref
I think Option A would be better with an interm solution having the simple edit controls obey the “Writing by Email” setting would be preferable to just getting WP to ignore that setting for everything accept email posts.