How to sort custom post type by custom date field?

  • After searching around rather extensively, I cannot find a solution and this is beyond my WP expertise to write myself:

    I have figured out how to get my output to sort by my custom field, but it is not sorting it “correctly”; it is currently sorting numerically by what is before the first “/”, and I need it to sort by the whole date. The date is in the format MM/DD/YYYY (but if the month is a single digit, it’s M/DD/YYYY), and currently it is only sorting by the month.

    Basically, my sort isn’t ordering things correctly, and I need to get it to sort by the date (not numerically).

    Here’s my loop and query:

    <?php $loop = new WP_Query( array(
				'post_type' => 'churchmedia',
				'posts_per_page' => '200',
				'meta_key'=>'date',
				'orderby'=>'meta_value',
				'order'=>'ASC',) );
		 while ( $loop->have_posts() ) : $loop->the_post(); ?>
			<?php
				$custom = get_post_custom($post->ID);
				$series = "". $custom["series"][0];
				$speaker = "". $custom["speaker"][0];
				$date = "". $custom["date"][0];
				$video = "". $custom["video"][0];
				$audio = "". $custom["audio"][0];
				$notes = "". $custom["notes"][0];
			?>

    Any help is greatly appreciated! This is driving me crazy.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • You need to store your dates in the format yy/mm/dd.

    Thread Starter johnnybebopcool

    (@johnnybebopcool)

    That seems to be working. Ill have to go back through and change them. It’s a good thing I can set this parameter on the date format, as we’re early enough in the project. Thank you!

    If you ever need to compare the date to any stored by WordPress, it might be better to store them in yyyy-mm-dd format so they can be compared directly.

    Thread Starter johnnybebopcool

    (@johnnybebopcool)

    For the record to anyone else trying to do this, I have my custom date field inputing in the yyyy/mm/dd format (with a note in the admin panel when inputting the custom posts to use that format), and then I have it reorder the display to mm/dd/yyyy and take out the leading 0’s for M and D on the archive site page with this code:

    <? $sdate = explode('/',$date);
						echo ltrim($sdate[1],'0')."/".ltrim($sdate[2],'0')."/".$sdate[0];
						?>

    This ended up being a lot simpler than I than I was thinking…no complicated query – just change and enforce a different date format and reorder the display output.

    vtxyzzy

    (@vtxyzzy)

    I would just like to reiterate that the format yyyy-mm-dd is best if you need to compare to a WordPress date. For instance, checking to see if a post is within a date range.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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