Listing results by category or taxonomy

Adding a little more detail to this question…

I guess what I’m trying to do is something similar to Google’s sponsored listings. So, when a user searches for a Teacher close to their postcode/city they are presented with the closest results, however with ‘sponsored’/’featured’ results first. Ideally, being able to not only style these ‘featured’ results differently but also using different layout from the template so I can add more detail.

I have looked at the function for filtering results using a dropdown but I need this to run prior to the results being listed and showing all categories (that I have pre-selected).

I have tried another approach;

The custom post type listed in my results include a custom meta-key (using the wp-types plugin) which is a dropdown select box. The dropdown has two options: Featured or Licensed. I found this code in another thread which allows me to filter results by this custom field:

function order_gmw_results($clauses, $gmwQuery) {
	global $wpdb;

	$clauses['join'] .= " LEFT JOIN {$wpdb->prefix}postmeta AS pmeta ON({$wpdb->prefix}posts.ID = pmeta.post_id AND pmeta.meta_key = 'wpcf-featured-or-licensed')";
	$clauses['orderby'] = "pmeta.meta_value";
	return $clauses;
}
add_filter('gmw_pt_location_query_clauses', 'order_gmw_results',10,2);

This works great, but is is possible to orderby multiple meta-keys so that the results are first sorted by my featured-or-licensed key, then by distance? As it works now the posts are jumbled by distance and appear to be sorted by publish date.

Any help to orderby multiple meta-keys would be very much appreciated!

It turned out to be a simple addition to the function above;

I replaced

$clauses['orderby'] = "pmeta.meta_value";

with

$clauses['orderby'] = "pmeta.meta_value, distance";

If you need to control the sort order you can do something like this:

$clauses['orderby'] = "pmeta.meta_value DESC, distance ASC";

This works for my project, however it would be helpful to understand how to filter using additional meta-keys or categories/taxonomies as an alternative.