External orders in WordPress queries
Saturday, November 29th, 2008The advanced WordPress user is intimately familiar with query_posts, the function which controls which posts are displayed in “The Loop.” query_posts gives plugin and theme writers the ability to display only posts written in Janary (query_posts("monthnum=1")) or disallow posts from a certain category (query_posts("cat=-529")1). One of the parameters you can set here is orderby which affects the ordering of the posts returned, with allowed values such as author, date, or title. But what if you want to order your posts in some other order, defined outside of your wp_posts table? Here I’m going to lay out some thoughts on rolling your own external ordering source for WordPress queries.
In order to introduce an external ordering source, we need to do four things:
1. create the external ordering source,
2. hook up (read “join”) the external ordering source
3. make sure we use that order, and
4. make it play nice. ^^
By the way, I’m going to assume you, dear reader, are PHP-savvy, proficient in MySQL, and already know a little about WordPress. This how-to is not for the PHPhobic.
