How to sort home page index posts by event date instead of post publish date

  • In researching this question, I find that most of the answers are multiple years old, so my hope is that there is now an easy way to do this that everyone else knows about except me. I would like to order the posts that display on the home page of the site (this is the page that displays the blog index so it’s not static) by a custom field “Event Date.” I can see how to create the custom field, but I don’t know how to get the index to SORT by this metadata.

    Here is the url for the site-in-progress:
    https://soazseniorpride.org/wp-jan2016/

    Thank you for any guidance!

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Thread Starter susantau

    (@susantau)

    My temporary workaround to make post excerpts on the home page appear in correct order (i.e., by actual event chronology) is by fudging post publish dates.

    Thread Starter susantau

    (@susantau)

    I hope no responses doesn’t mean this is a ridiculously dumb question. Just even a hint about where to go to get more info would be appreciated! ??

    Thread Starter susantau

    (@susantau)

    Note to the Forum Moderator: I’m still trying to figure out a way to do this. I will post the result of my research here when I find a solution or I am ready to call it quits and summarize my thoughts. So I will appreciate if you don’t close this Topic until I can provide this closure. Thank you!!

    Thread Starter susantau

    (@susantau)

    ACK – I admit defeat. I can only find solutions that are many years old and/or are confusing (to me) code/database modifications, or are plugins that provide too many features and/or are obsolete as well. The fact that relevant plugins have become obsolete suggests there is a better solution available now… but, alas, I can’t find it.

    I simply would like indexes to order blog posts by event date (my custom field), not publish date – this seems like it would be of interest to a lot of folks, not just me.

    Thread Starter susantau

    (@susantau)

    ESSENTIAL INFO UPDATES:
    the site has gone live and is now at https://soazseniorpride.org
    the site is now using WordPress 4.4.2

    Thread Starter susantau

    (@susantau)

    At last, I have at least a workaround. It’s a plugin called, “Order Your Posts Manually.”
    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/order-your-posts-manually/

    Via a sweet drag and drop, I position the upcoming events in the post list into ascending order, so oldest appears at top on the upcoming events index page, and I position past events into descending order – so on the index page where past event posts are displayed, the latest are at the top.

    This plugin modifies the creation or modification (you choose) dates of posts in the database, so it isn’t the answer for you if you need those dates to be accurate.

    But it’s a great workaround for me for now.

    Someday I hope WordPress offers the option to order posts by event date, as well as to be able to list them by descending or ascending order for different index pages of a given site.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • The topic ‘How to sort home page index posts by event date instead of post publish date’ is closed to new replies.