Thread

Hi,

Very new to this and have caused myself a bit of confusion.

I have a “services” page and on that page I want the entries to be displayed in a specified order rather than most recent first or last (asc or desc). This is so the services are read by the client in a logical fashion.

I have worked out that if I change the date in the publish form of the 5 entries on the page then I can achieve this but think there muse be a better way!

Help greatly appreciated

Regards

Rob

Probably the most elegant way is using the excellent Low Reorder add-on.  It allows you to create an “order by” field (that you can then hide so as not to confuse the editing process) in your channel, then when you access the add-on, you select the channel you would like to reorder (it lists all those in which you have established a “low reorder field” and it lists the entries, which you drag and drop to the order you would like and click save.  The only change to your entries lop is to then set orderby=“your_low_reorder_field_name” and sort to either ascending or descending depending on what you’re looking to do (ascending tends to make a direct connection to the way you drag and drop them in the add-on).

Hi John,

Thanks for helping out. Before I looked at any add-ons I want ed to make sure that there wasn’t any native EE functionality that allowed me to achieve this?

Would you say that using the Low Reorder add-on is fairly standard to achieve displaying things in a set order or should I be doing something else?

Again, help appreciated.

Cheers

Rob

Technically you can employ the same approach that Low Reorder implements for you, but natively you’d have to jump through some additional hoops:

1) you’d still need to create a field that is explicitly for ordering purposes - a numeric field, for example, which is really all Low Reorder is doing anyway
2) you’d then have to go into each entry and enter the number into that field - there’s be no way natively to see the order of all of your entries since you can’t add custom fields to your edit list view in the CP natively (Zenbu is an add-on that does give you that ability)
3) and so tied in with there, thee would be no drag and drop ordering, for example - you have to do it manually - not as much of a pain as with jigging the dates, but not hugely more convenient either.

So yes, you can do it natively to be certain, it’s just not quite as quick to set up nor is it quite as convenient to manage - it’s a critical functionality I’d love to see added to EE, as choosing the order of your entries is vital for a CMS, whereas ordering exclusively (or by default) by date is a bit of a blog throwback.

Thanks and I’m very surprised that this is something not in EE. I’ve used Joomla for a few sites last year and that has the functionality baked in. Having said that I love the flexibility that you have with EE hence why I’ve spend a good month learning the basics!!

I’ll take a look at the add Low Reorder add on next week.

Thanks and have a good weekend.

Cheers

Rob