WordPress' various filter hooks to augment those queries to get the results you need. In a recent blog post " Sort wp-e-commerce products by category and product title ", I showed how to use this approach to change the database query that wp-e-commerce uses to build a page, and sort it in a custom way. The crux of that post was to: use the filter hook 'parse_query' to check for conditions that mark a posts query as a wp-e-commerce product query use the filter hook 'posts_join' to add the category name to the SQL query use the filter hook 'posts_orderby' to change the SQL order by clause I won't repeat the code here because you can see it on that post, but it bears mentioning as a general approach to the problem of changing how a plugin retrieves a list of posts when it doesn't give you any filter hooks to change its behaviour: use WordPress hooks. Option Hooks Another approach that I've used a few times, and again just today, is to intercept the plugin fetching its options and change them before the plugin can use them. Often, a plugin makes use of options to drive how it behaves, and you can change the plugin's behaviour by changing those options on the fly. It's a bit kludgey, but needs must! The WordPress function get_option has some filter hooks that let you intercept any calls to it, both before and after it retrieves the options. In particular, at the end