Order By Custom Field Using Meta Key for Pricing

I looked everywhere for this, and I had to piece the information together to make it work for my circumstance. I think others may get some use out of this, so I wanted to post it.

Situation: Need to order posts or a custom post type using custom fields, particularly for ordering by prices. This situation was for real estate using custom fields with prices in the thousands and millions.

Problems: The posts wouldn’t order correctly because I used commas and dollar signs in the custom fields. When I removed these, I no longer had commas in the prices where I needed them (200100 instead of $200,100).

Solution: In your custom fields, enter the prices without dollar signs or commas. Hard-code the dollar sign in the template and use the basic PHP number format to add commas automatically.

Here’s the gist:

<?php
$args = array(
'post_type' => 'your_post_type',
'orderby' => 'meta_value_num',
'meta_key' => 'price',
'order' => 'DESC'
);
?>

In my template file for the post, I used this to get the custom field and show the price in the proper format:

<?php $price = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'price', true);
if ( $price ) { ?>
Price: $<?php echo number_format($price ,",",",",","); ?>
<?php } else {} ?>

Hope this helps someone out there!