aStickyPostOrderER : Plugin To Change WordPress Post Order

Posted on 20 November 2007 by André SC

If you’d like to re-arrange the order that WordPress displays posts this plugin might help.

With aStickyPostOrderER you can customize the order of appearance of posts per category, per tag – or over-all – in a WordPress (versions 2.3+) blog. Useful for using WordPress as a Content Management System (C.M.S.).

NB! This will only work with WordPress 2.3+!

Download

Downloads and latest version now via the official WordPress plugins repository.

aStickyPostOrderER 0.2.2.2 Beta (22 December 2007) – This latest beta version includes the ability to set meta-stickiness, i.e. you can specify that post from a specific category or tag, or a specified number of posts of same should appear before or after the sorted posts, or after everything else.

Wish-list

In future I might add these abilities:

to have stickiness expire at a certain point in time and such,
to also order per tag done
specify CSS selectors or custom code insertion to identify ‘sticky’ posts
and have some auto configuration options etc.
to propagate order set for parent categories to child categories
set entire category sticky etc. in beta
order-by-day and/or order-by-month etc. (Good idea, Thanx Mike!)

Ideas and requests most welcome!

Change Log

v0.2.2.1 – 22 Dec 2007:
As described above, implemented the meta-stickiness functionality, bit more clean up of interface.
v0.2 – 18 Dec 2007:
Lots of stability improvements and as well as the interface elements for meta-stickiness – which when implemented will allow you to specify that you e.g. want the last 5 posts in a specific category(ies) or tag(s) to precede everything else, or move an entire category right to the ‘bottom’ and some stuff in between – more detail when I release the next version (hopefully with that part working. Special thanks to Alvise Nicoletti of for a significant amount of testing issues related to using the plugin with complex nested category structures – also for the great review of the plugin he’s published.
v0.1.7 – 2 Dec 2007:
Fixed bug in MySQL that created listing errors in some cases for some blogs that had been updated from previous versions of WordPress.
v0.1.6 – 28 Nov 2007:
Adds ability to order posts per tag and improves interface showing no. of sorted posts / cat. or tag.
v0.1.5 – 27 Nov 2007:
Support for non-default database prefixes.
Not listing empty post categories as options for sorting.
Show name of the category being sorted while sorting.
v0.1.4 – 22 Nov 2007:
Fixed the creation of the database table at activation of the plugin.
v0.1.3 – 21 Nov 2007 :
Modified DB structure to eliminate errors reported associated with ambiguous field names, changing title to aStickyPostOrderER.

Background

I created this plugin to solve the cahallenge posed by non-trivial ordering of posts when using WordPress as a Content Management System(C.M.S.) at David Krut Publishing.

There we use a single WordPress install to run both the news and blog sections as well as a bookshop catalog – for news items the default reverse chronological order is perfect but in the case of books there are issues other than date of uploading to the site that should determine the prominence the particular ‘post’ about a book is given on the site. This plugin allows manulally configuring the order posts appear in when viewing a specific category – with ordered posts apearing first followed by the rest in their usual order without braking the default WordPress pagination.

Sites that use aStickyPostOrderER

If you use aStickyPostOrderER please pop me an email saying so with your URL (along with any praise you’d like to include:) to andre@pixelplexus.co.za and I’ll link to your site from here.

Donations & Punting

Please consider making a donation towards my hosting

and/or giving this page a dig:

How To

Unzip and place the ‘aStickyPostOrderER’ folder with its content in the WordPress plugins directory.
Activate on the admin panel’s plugins page.
Click on Manage, aStickyPostOrderER.
Click on the name of a category or tag you want to order.
(Those with fewer than two posts are not displayed)
Posts in that category are listed, each with a text field to the right of it.
Type a number into that field to make the corresponding post appear in that position relative to existing sorted posts, e.g. 1 to make it appear at the top, if there is already a post assigned to that position the sorted posts will be shifted up.
- To remove a sorted post from the sticky list, send it to position 0 (zero).
- Post that are not sorted will still appear in the default order after the sorted posts on the blog’s front-end.

Known Issues

Themes that execute their own MySQL queries may not (read ‘probably won’t') show the posts in the sorted order. A good way to test is by using the Default theme and comparing results.
There were various issues with previous versions that affected especially blogs with content that had been upgraded from earlier versions of WordPress, please use the latest version of the plugin.

233 thoughts on “aStickyPostOrderER : Plugin To Change WordPress Post Order”

alainS on 20 November 2007 at 11:13 pm said:

Nice candidate fot “best of” plugin!
I’ll give it a try during next week.
Just a question:
What happens if there are two posts with same “order number”? Or what happens if I want to make some post number 2 but there is already a post marked with nr.2?

Keep on the good work and thank you for making this great plugin!
André SC on 21 November 2007 at 12:14 am said:

AlainS: Thanx :-)

At the moment, if there is allready a sorted post at position 2 the post you assigned to 2 will move to position 3 and all other sorted posts after 2 will shift up to make space for it.

I’ll probably rewrite the logic to move the original no 2 post to position 3 in the next version
Ben on 21 November 2007 at 5:55 pm said:

Hi Andre,

Great plug-in — been looking for something like this for ages!

fyi – I did have to create the db table manually from the info in the php file? Not sure why it didn’t create it automatically? (using version 2.3.1)

But it works great now. Any chance of up/down arrows in a future release?

Many thanks,

Ben
Marty on 21 November 2007 at 7:21 pm said:

Andre!!!! You are a lifesaver… this plugin totally saved me hours of frustration today. I had the same problem as Ben with the auto-creation of the table not working… It was pretty easy to pull the information from the “function croer_install” (line 158 of astickypostorderer.php)

after that it was flawless…

thx again

Marty
André SC on 21 November 2007 at 7:37 pm said:

I’ll have a look at the DB code tonight, sorry about that.
Eric on 22 November 2007 at 3:52 am said:

Andre,

This is a fantastic plugin. You’ve just answered the wishes of many WordPress users.

I’m running your aStickyPostOrderRE 0.1.4 Beta on two WordPress 2.3.1 sites, and it works perfectly.

Very nice work. Thank you so much!

– Eric
chris on 25 November 2007 at 10:47 pm said:

Great job!!!
For some reason creators of WP has forgoten about such basic option (I’m not able to understand why).
There’s one thing to improve, links from post subject should lead to site not http://www.davidkrutpublishing.com/ site (for instance: http://www.davidkrutpublishing.com/dkp/?p=5).

Thank you very much for your work!!
Andrew Garley on 26 November 2007 at 8:07 pm said:

Your a Star!!
I have been playing with an Idea of WordPress as my Main Website for my Articles.
But my lessons are in Order or will be when i post them.

So this plugin not only works great easy install, Its changed how i am going to use WP now.

I like many spent hours trying to figure out post order.

I looked in the support forums, seems many questions dont get replys, I am so thankful i found your post.

Again your a star, Thanks so much for a great plugin!
Andrew Garley
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André SC on 27 November 2007 at 7:13 am said:

b.t.w. the next version will be ready in the next day or two and, allows you to sort by tag

A
Rirath on 27 November 2007 at 11:03 am said:

This may be too trivial for this plugin, but I’d be really happy if there was a “reverse order” option per category. Right now I use either pages or category templates, but simply clicking an option in your reorder plugin would be far easier.
André SC on 27 November 2007 at 11:11 am said:

Rirath: I’ll see what I can do for you in the next version.
Mike Lanxess on 27 November 2007 at 3:08 pm said:

Thanks so much for this great plugin! I’ve tried it out on several of our WP installations and found two problems:

- I got an error message after “Select a different category to re-order”. The error message is
*Warning: mysql_fetch_array(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in (…)/wp-content/plugins/aStickyPostOrderER/croer-listcats.php on line 34* Then the ordering table appears, but with IDs with empty names etc. Looks like in former times deleted categories. But the posts can be ordered, anyway.

- In WP installations with DB prefixes other than “wp_” (eg. “wp_secure” for different weblogs on the same DB or for security reasons) the plugin seems to have problems.

Hope this information helps! Keep pushing, great work!!!
André SC on 27 November 2007 at 3:22 pm said:

Mike: Thanx, re the prefix – that actually occur occurred to me this morning (round about the time I noticed the pingback from Weblog Tools… irk) will try to get a fix out tonight! – the MySQL error seems a bit strange will look into that, you were using WordPress 2.3+?
Mike Lanxess on 27 November 2007 at 4:06 pm said:

… for clarification of the SQL error: have a look at this screenshot. The site runs 2.3.1.
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news on 29 November 2007 at 2:32 pm said:

very nice plugin for all cms related sites i.e. gossips and news sites thanks
Get Rich Geek on 29 November 2007 at 8:58 pm said:

Thank you, thank you, thank you! I have been so frustrated! Life is so much beter now!
André SC on 29 November 2007 at 9:29 pm said:

Get Rich Geek : Getting a comment like that makes it even more of a pleasure. I think you’ll like the up-coming functionality even more.

Also, I really like the crisp professional look of your site.
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Sven-Alexander on 1 December 2007 at 12:11 pm said:

this plugin is awesome! but i get the following error:
[Table 'xyz.wp_croer_posts' doesn't exist] …
i am using wordpress 2.3.1

can anyone help?
André SC on 1 December 2007 at 6:47 pm said:

Hi Sven

which version of the plugin are you using, and where do you get the error? If you could send me a html page source of the page where you see the error that would make it easier to identify the issue

A
André SC on 2 December 2007 at 1:31 am said:

New version version 0.1.7 fixes some MySQL flaws.
Mike Lanxess on 2 December 2007 at 9:34 pm said:

v0.1.7 works excellent, Thks!
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Jim on 5 December 2007 at 6:04 pm said:

‘word1.wp_croer_posts’ doesn’t exist

that is the error I recieved. I created my blog in a folder named “word1″ and then moved it to my root without a problem. I would love for this to work. Any ideas? as to the problem.

using latest wordpress with the blixed theme
http://www.youpickthesermon.com
Molly on 5 December 2007 at 6:58 pm said:

Thank you so much for this plugin! This is the first plugin I have tried to use with our blog that worked on the first try. Thank you for making my life a little easier today!
doniek on 6 December 2007 at 5:03 pm said:

Cool thing, i looking something like this
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Nokao on 12 December 2007 at 12:31 am said:

Hi…

I’m trying your plugin but in the main page I don’t have all categories, I miss the 3 I need to re-order.

What can it be? an incompatiblity with one of my other plugins?

My Category Order ( http://www.geekyweekly.com/mycategoryorder )
Top Level Categories ( http://fortes.com/projects/wordpress/top-level-cats/ )

?
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André SC on 18 December 2007 at 11:40 pm said:

new version out (0.2.1)
Yohay on 22 December 2007 at 2:45 pm said:

This is a great plugin indeed.
I have a problem with international characters. I’m using it in a Hebrew blog, and I seed question marks instead of category names and post names.
Is there a solution or workaround for this issue?

Thanks,
Yohay.
André SC on 22 December 2007 at 4:03 pm said:

I’ll have to get to looking at the internationalization a bit later, have some real work waiting, in the meantime Yohay mailed me a hack to fix the encoding issue:

Here’s the road to the solution:
http://shodan.co.za/archive/unicode-php-and-mysql/

I search your code for
mysql_query
and added
mysql_query(“SET NAMES ‘utf8′”);
before every original mysql_query call.
It solved the problem!

I’m sure that there is a more elegant solution, but this patch is enough for me.

Good luck,
Yohay.
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Andrew on 27 December 2007 at 6:43 pm said:

Hi,
I am getting the following errors. WordPress database error: [Table 'golfs_wrdp1.wp_croer_posts' doesn't exist]

Please advise.
Website is yourimprovegolfswing.com

Thanks.
André SC on 28 December 2007 at 10:17 pm said:

Version: 0.2.2.3 fixes the problem Andrew identified above.
Andrew on 29 December 2007 at 5:02 pm said:

Hi,
I used it but error is now on

Warning: mysql_fetch_array(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/golfs/public_html/wp-content/plugins/astickypostorderer/astickypostorderer.php on line 203

Thanks again.
Frank Lucas on 29 December 2007 at 7:12 pm said:

WordPress: v2.3.1
MySQL: v5.0.45-community-nt
PHP: v4.4.7
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0

v0.2.2.3 reported”

Warning: mysql_fetch_array(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in D:\Domains\sunrisedancer.com\www\weathervane\wp-content\plugins\astickypostorderer\croer-functions.php on line 10 Categories
Warning: mysql_numrows(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in D:\Domains\sunrisedancer.com\www\weathervane\wp-content\plugins\astickypostorderer\croer-listcats.php on line 92
Warning: mysql_numrows(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in D:\Domains\sunrisedancer.com\www\weathervane\wp-content\plugins\astickypostorderer\croer-listcats.php on line 92

Regards.

PixelPLEXUS

where some pixels meet for drinks after a hard day

aStickyPostOrderER : Plugin To Change WordPress Post Order

233 thoughts on “aStickyPostOrderER : Plugin To Change WordPress Post Order”

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