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sorting in alphabetical order

  1. laughterlog
    Inactive

    Hi all, I'm just coming to grips with WordPress. It's fantastic, but I'm having to tweak a few things to make it work for my purposes, which is to list a series of articles in different categories, and preferably in alphabetical order.

    Yes I know it's not technically a 'blog' in the strictest sense of the word, but otherwise this platform is perfect for the non-tech people who will be doing the updates as they write the articles, plus so easy to set up with the free hosting and software all done for you.

    Even though blogs typically display the latest post at the top, I think there should be other ways of sorting as it would allow a wider range of blogs. And as with most new technology concepts, it is going to be used for a broader range of things than originally intended, so why fight it? :)

    Eg if someone posted a recipe every day, even if the latest post appears first on the front page as per blogging, it'd make sense if when clicking on eg the 'chicken' category or tag, the resulting recipes appear in whatever order the author wants (date order, alphabetical order etc). Ditto for book reviews etc.

    Does that make it more of a CMS? I'd say it's a blog/CMS hybrid as the front page is still a blog in all senses of the word, but as a data repository for that information it needs better retrieval tools like you'd see in a CMS.

    I've done lots of searching of the forums re this sorting issue, and the only workaround at the moment (apart from going over to wordpress.org) I could see was to manipulate the date. Which is a bit of a pain as you have a lot of listings and it has to be done backwards. Eg the year 2000 for posts starting with the letter A, 1999 for the letter B, and so on.

    Then I came across the archives shortcode, which almost does what I want, except that it does a listing of ALL posts (rather than per category or tag), and isn't sorted how I want.

    So, my workaround was to create a page with the archives shortcode on it, grab the html, paste i into Word, do some careful search and replacing to separate the url from the name into different columns, sort by the column with the name, convert back to text and cut and paste into the html of a page or post. Phew!

    Although then all the categories are jumbled in together, so my next step would be to edit all of the post titles to reflect the title in the name (I haven't added them all yet so it's not much extra work), then they'll sort by title.

    What do people think? The Word stuff could be saved as a Macro, so it would be a quick job to do an overall update every month or so.

    PS the site isn't live yet, still working on it.

  2. raincoaster
    Member

    Those things are all possible with independenly-installed WordPress software from WordPress.org and a really good ability to handle the technical side of things.

    Pasting from Word will eventually cripple your blog if you're not extremely careful. See the Support section for details of that particular mess. Save things into Blogdesk or Windows Live Writer or some other HTML-compatible format, not Word.

  3. laughterlog
    Inactive

    Thanks Raincoaster.

    The people I'm setting this up for will want it to be a 'set and forget' arrangement so that I won't need to be involved much in the future, if at all, which wouldn't be the case with the necessary updates etc required at wordpres.org. I am teetering on whether I can quite manage with.com, but I've come this far!

    On that subject, if moving over from .com to .org, I know you can export/import data, but are there the same themes at .org? (I know there's more, but I'm not sure if they include these ones).

    The Word stuff I referred to is purely html which gets pasted back into the html editor, so there's no extra stuff going in.

    However, posts will probably be prepared in Word, how much of this before it becomes a problem? Is it only a problem if you're going back and editing the post?

    And what about the Word cleanup tool, or the 'paste as text' option, are they not satisfactory?

    Oh, and what about posting straight from Word (2007) using its blogging tool, does that add all the extra html stuff too?

    I'll check out those other wordprocessors, thanks.

  4. laughterlog
    Inactive

    Interesting, I've just done some experimenting with changing the date for the posts, and if I make it eg 1900, the post displays today's date, but it sorts it based on this really old date, which it continues to display when editing the post, despite showing a current date on the post!

    This is using the Contempt theme.

  5. raincoaster
    Member

    Word is a problem. Word will be a HUGE problem, over the course of the blog, and could cause it to become unreadable. We've seen it quite frequently.

    If you use the Paste from Word option on the WP.com write post page, you should avoid issues. But it's generally not a good idea. Writing in notepad or something that uses REAL HTML instead of whatever bizarre Microsoftian dialect Word uses will help you.

  6. laughterlog
    Inactive

    Wow, that's a big deal, a lot of people would be using Word to write stuff up and cutting and pasting it into WP. Anyway, thanks for the info, the main author is going to be encouraged to use Notepad or directly into the site.

  7. raincoaster
    Member

    Yes, lots of people do it, and then they come here to find out how to fix it.

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