Order get_terms by ACF field, even if the field is not set

• Flaschenzug

• October 2, 2021 at 4:31 am

Hello everyone.

I added a custom field (order_by) for the category term.
The categorys have a parent and are listed seperatly by the parents:

Main Cat 1
– Sub Cat 1 (order_by = )
– Sub Cat 2 (order_by = )
– Sub Cat 3 (order_by = )
– …
(should be sorted by “name” because order_by is not set)

Main Cat 2
– Morning (order_by = 1)
– Afternoon (order_by = 2)
– Evening (order_by = 3)
(should be sorted by “order_by”)

The problem
If I fetch the terms with the meta_key “order_by”, I only get the terms that have an order_by value. The subcats from Main Cat 1 are not displayed.

'hide_empty'  => false,
'child_of' => $value->term_id,
'meta_key'      => 'order_by',
'meta_compare'  => 'NUMERIC',
'orderby'       => 'meta_value_num',
'order'         => 'ASC',

Any idea to make that happen?

Thanks 🙂

• Flaschenzug

• October 5, 2021 at 12:48 pm

Does anyone have any ideas?
I haven’t made any progress yet, unfortunately.

• John Huebner

• October 11, 2021 at 5:45 pm

I recently built something similar

This is my usort function for ordering terms

function sort_vid_terms_by_menu_order($a, $b) {
  if ($a->sort_order == $b->sort_order) {
    return 0;
  } elseif ($a->sort_order < $b->sort_order) {
    return -1;
  } else {
    return 1;
  }
} // end function sort_terms_by_menu_order

and this is how I get the terms

$args = array(
  'taxonomy' => $taxonomy,
  'hide_empty' => true,
  'parent' => $parent,
  'hierarchical' => true
);
$terms = get_terms($args);
if (!empty($terms)) {
  foreach ($terms as $index => $term) {
    $term->sort_order = intval(get_field('sidebar_menu_order', $term));
  }
  usort($terms, 'sort_vid_terms_by_menu_order');
}