Sorting posts on meta value / custom field

Hi all,

Background:
I have a post category that is containing events. I add the event date to a custom field. I need the latest event to show on top but it is sorting on publishing date.

I named the event date field: “event-date” and I enter date in the format of 2015-01-22 which makes it sort-able as string.

This is the query I have been trying out, however it don’t seem to work.

$args = array(
	'meta_key'   => 'event-date',
	'orderby'    => 'meta_value',
	'order'      => $queryOrder,
	'meta_query' => array(
	array(
		'cat'=> get_cat_id($categoryOne),
		'posts_per_page'=> -1,
		'showposts' => $listMax
		),
	),
);

$query = new WP_Query( $args );
query_posts($query);

Can anyone see what I am doing wrong? It still seems to sort on publishing date…

Thanks in advance/Jesper Wilfing

Ps. I have tried to set post publishing date to the event date and modified query to display unpublished posts. Had some problems with that, among other things I also needed to display past posts “if today” which was too tricky.

Ps2. Maybe the easiest thing would be to find a plugin that could give me the data in JSON format. That would make it so much easier to handle by myself.