Ordering Post on Front Page

This has been asked for a few times before, but I’ve yet to see a way to do this. I think your best option is to use one of the “recent comments” plugins.

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Plugins/Comments
https://dev.wp-plugins.org/browser/recent-comments/branches/

I have a similar question. I would like to order my posts NOT based on dates but based on my own numbering.

Is there a clean, elegant way of doing this? I’d rather not try and do this by forcing dates in a certain order.

I thought of adding a custom field called “Ranking”, but can I do this at a category level instead of post level?