Page Template: List of posts, sorted by array of categories?

[tewonawonga]

Hey everyone. Long time no post—guess that's a sign that my PHP skills are improving at least a little.

I'm trying to build a custom page template that outputs an array of categories with a list of posts for each, something like this:

<h3>Category 1</h3>

<ul>
<li>Post 1 in category 1</li>
<li>Post 2 in category 1</li>
</ul>

<h3>Category 2</h3>

<ul>
<li>Post 1 in category 2</li>
<li>Post 2 in category 2</li>
</ul>

...and so on. I've used James Wilkes' Category Post List plugin and it's working great (you can see the results here, all snazzified with jQuery Accordion: http://debbiekoenig.com/recipe-index/)

BUT, my client would like to have the option of substituting a custom field for the post title too. Instead of hacking away at the plugin by James—which is built around a complex shortcode setup—I figured it's time that I write something simpler for myself.

Can anyone point me in the direction of a good tutorial or help me get started? Thanks in advance!

[andreasnrb]

Of the top of my head, perhaps this works.
If you know on which page the "shortcode" is run you can filter get_the_title function and return the postmeta value instead.
if(is_page(x) ... )//so the replace aint run on all posts and pages
add_filter('the_title','replace_with_post_meta')

function replace_with_post_meta($title,$post_id){
$new_title=get_post_meta($post_id,'metakey',true);
$title=$new_title?$new_title:$title;
return $title;
}