control post order with options page

• danstramer

• October 22, 2020 at 9:25 am

Hi All
I would like to control the order of the posts in the archive page.
Have a drop down with:
–order by Date
–order by Title
and a radio button for:
–ASC and
–DESC

This should work for posts and custom post type separately, in the future, maybe based on a category.
The control would be within an ‘Options’ page.

Could you lead me in the right direction, has anyone done this feature before?

Thanks!
Dan

• John Huebner

• October 22, 2020 at 11:05 pm

I do this for posts_per_page for different post types so that clients can determine how many posts to show on archive pages.

You need to create a pre_get_posts query and check settings and alter the query based on the settings.

Here is an example filter I created for a recent project that does this

function pre_get_posts_locations($query) {
  
  // not in admin or if not main query
  if (is_admin() || !$query->is_main_query()) {
    return;
  }
  
  // only queries for location post type
  if (!isset($query->query_vars) ||
      !isset($query->query_vars['post_type']) ||
      $query->query_vars['post_type'] != 'location') {
    return;
  }
  
  // not for single
  if (is_single()) {
    return;
  }
  
  // set locations per page
  $posts_per_page = get_field('locations_per_page', 'options');
  if ($posts_per_page === NULL || $posts_per_page === false) {
    // if never set show default of 10
    $posts_per_page = 10;
  }
  if (!$posts_per_page) {
    // if set to 0 show all
    $posts_per_page = -1;
  }
  $query->set('posts_per_page', $posts_per_page);
  
  // show only active locations
  $meta_query = array(
    array(
      'key' => 'active',
      'value' => 1
    )
  );
  $query->set('meta_query', $meta_query);
  
  $orderby = array(
    'menu_order' => 'ASC',
    'title' => 'ASC'
  );
  $query->set('orderby', $orderby);
  
  
}

The orderby part of the query at the end could also be set up to use options settings if needed.

• danstramer

• October 29, 2020 at 5:09 am

Thank you John, I will try that out.

Dan