I agree that what I am looking for is likely to be difficult/impossible to implement in a plugin. So maybe someone with some insight on current development can chime in and/or bring this up with developers.
To clarify further: I am looking for a more role based approach to controlling who can create content in different categories. But I also want to control who can view content in those categories based on their membership in a role based group. These are sometimes called “sections” in other CMS’s. So for instance, most sections would be public and everyone could read and maybe only registered users comment, a normal setup. Then I might have a couple categories that were only visible for reading by registered members of a specific, defined group (role based). Furthermore I could allow or disallow content creation in those categories based on membership a role based group.
There are solutions out there that implement this functionality, but they are all much more bloated CMS’s rather than blog engines. They take much more work to setup and manage and are more oriented to entire site content management instead of focusing on blogging. Some examples ezpublish, Xaraya.
I want a simple blog engine that implements the del.icio.us like categorizing and “drilling down.” Where it shows you everything and allows you to narrow your focus by clicking on the categories/tags. That’s what led me to wordpress. It of course has this functionality as categories or using the tags plugin. WordPress is also incredibly easy to set up and manage; it’s only lacking role based acls.
