Dynamic query_posts and children

Hi everyone,

I’m building a magazine in WordPress. Each issue is yearly. I’ve decided to use categories as the delineator of issues. By doing so I have nice URL structures. blog.com/2010/features. During the current issue blog.com and blog.com/2010 will be identical. That is until content is added to the 2011 category and the site admin flips the switch. I will be creating a plugin that allows for site admins to set which category gets displayed on the homepage and becomes the current issue.

The category structure is as follows:

2010
      -Features
      -Faculty
      -Alumni
      ...
      -Student Spotlight
2011
      -Features
      -Faculty
      -Alumni
      ...
      -Student Spotlight

What I need to do is something resembling child_of=’2010′ with name of ‘Features’ in my query. Because I’m duplicating categories each time there is a new issue, I can’t hard code category ID’s.

To reiterate, I’ll first need to grab all the posts from the most current top level category as determined by a plugin that sets that variable. Then within all those posts I need to query 5 or 6 posts in varying degrees within each child category based on name.

Is this making sense? It’s late.