[Plugin: Connections] Non-Alphabetic Order

Hello mparks,

I do not have a solution for you, but I would like to chime in with my 10cents, it would be great if we could set a custom display order for each entry.

Maybe a display priority, or the ability to set the order manually.

Thanks for a great plugin.
=-)

I want to follow up with my request for this feature also. It’s common for organizations to list leaders/management first. There is currently no way to do this.

It’s important to me to have this functionality. Do you intend to add support for this in the near future?

Thanks for your plugin.

Ok, I’ll add this feature to the .8 release which is coming soon. Right now I’ve been verifying that the plugin in 100% compatible with WordPress 3.0. So far everything seems good, but I did find a few bugs, so a bug fix release is coming any day.

The next release of Connections will have this feature added. Actually the plug-in already has a very robust ordering options. For example you can order by any of these fields in either ascending or descending order:

* id
* first_name
* last_name
* organization
* department
* city
* state
* zipcode
* country
* birthday
* anniversary

The id field can also be set to display in a specified order, what you’re seeking, or in a random order. Actually if you wish, you could even display the entire list or category randomly. This can be useful for business directories, give each listing an opportunity to be at or near the top of the list.

If anyone is interested, I had a client who had to have custom ordering and I just added it to my local copy of connections 0.7.0.4 today (I’m not the author). I wasn’t sure when shazahm1 was going to put out his next release and I needed the feature today. This is by far the best plugin for staff management.

The post is old, this can be done in the current version. For example say you have 10 entries and you only want to list 5 of them in a specific order this is the shortcode you would use:

[connections_list id=’9,1,7,3,5′ order_by=’id|SPECIFIC’]

Here’s the list of current sort options…

Sort fields:

* id
* first_name
* last_name
* organization
* department
* city
* state
* zipcode
* country
* birthday
* anniversary

Order Flags:

* SORT_ACS
* SORT_DESC
* SPECIFIC**
* RANDOM**

Sort Types:

* SORT_REGULAR
* SORT_NUMERIC
* SORT_STRING

**NOTE: The SPECIFIC and RANDOM order flags can only be used with the id field. The SPECIFIC flag must be used in conjunction with the id shortcode attribute which must be a comma delimited of entry IDs. If this is set, other sort fields/flags are ignored.

I figured that out, but my client wanted to do it via the admin. They’re used to an “order position” field on the form. I don’t think they’d be able to figure out how to use the shortcode ??

I tested [connections_list id=’9,1,7,3,5′ order_by=’id|SPECIFIC’]. It shows me the only the five staffs but the ordering is 1,3,5,7,9 ???

I found the problem: It must the word “SPECIFIED”

[connections_list id=’9,1,7,3,5′ order_by=’id|SPECIFIED’]

and it works….