Ben

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.

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!

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).

To explain further on what I’m trying to do ………

I’m creating a Teacher’s Directory where every Teacher has their own post/page within State/Region categories, and parent categories of Country.

On those Country category pages I would like search forms where you can select a State/Region (from a dropdown list) and then Courses Available (from checkboxes). The Courses Available are custom fields and I would like the search function to find results that match ANY of the courses selected – not ALL. In other words, if a user selects Course 1 and Course 2, I would like search results displayed to include Teachers who only teach Course 1 and only teach Course 2.

If anyone has any suggestions on how I could go about this better than with the plugins above, it would be most welcome. ??

Hey guys. Just thought I’d mention that I’ve switched from Flutter to Magic Fields too and have found the white-label-cms plugin to work in beautifully with it. Basically it lets you hide all the other less-used admin navigation links, so you can strip it right down to only Magic Fields showing – great for client’s websites.