[wp-hackers] Sorting on Custom Fields

[Ken]

On 7/13/2010 4:35 PM, Peter Westwood wrote:
>
> On 13 Jul 2010, at 20:00, Kevin Newman wrote:
>
>> I'm creating a plugin which will extend the post with a ton of custom fields (50 or so per post, mostly booleans, some numbers and some text). I'll need to be able to ORDER BY (to use SQL terminology) these fields (as well as search on them).
>>
>> There is a plugin called wp-smart-sort which seems to do sorting by looping through the results of a custom query and storing the post data in an array and ordering that in memory ("seems to", because I didn't take the code apart all that thoroughly).
>>
>> I'm leaning toward using a custom table, because sorting in server memory seems inefficient, and I have a crazy number of values anyway. But serializing those in a single custom field, doesn't seem crazy either.
>>
>> Anyway, I'd love to see opinions on this. :-)
>>
>
> Do we not have support for query_posts / WP_Query to do this already?
>
> You can order by meta_keys and meta_values from what I recall.
>

http://wplookup.com is helpful for this.

You may be looking for this (Codex should be improved soon do to the 3.org)
http://codex.wordpress.org/Displaying_Posts_Using_a_Custom_Select_Query
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/query_posts
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_posts
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/add_meta_box
http://codex.wordpress.org/Custom_Fields
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_post_meta

I've had luck reading
http://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trunk/wp-includes/taxonomy.php
http://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trunk/wp-admin/includes/taxonomy.php
http://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trunk/wp-admin/includes/template.php