Question

I have made a post type, “events”, that use a custom field, “Datum” (Swedish for date). I want the default view for this post type to be sorted by this field.

So far I got:

 register_post_type(
                'events',
                array(
                        'labels' => array(
                                'name' => __( 'Arrangemang' ),
                                'singular_name' => __( 'Arrangemang' )
                        ),
                        'supports' => array(
                                'title',
                                'editor',
                                'custom-fields'
                        ),
                        'public' => true,
                        'has_archive' => true,
                        'query_var' => array(
                                'post_type' => 'events',
                                'meta_key' => 'Datum',
                                'orderby' => 'meta_value',
                                'order' => 'ASC',
                        ),
                )
        );

But the ordering doesn’t work. If I on the archive page for events run print_r($wp_query->query_vars); I get:

Array
(
    [post_type] => events
    [error] =>
    [m] => 0
    [p] => 0
    [post_parent] =>
    [subpost] =>
    [subpost_id] =>
    [attachment] =>
    [attachment_id] => 0
    [name] =>
    [static] =>
    [pagename] =>
    [page_id] => 0
    [second] =>
    [minute] =>
    [hour] =>
    [day] => 0
    [monthnum] => 0
    [year] => 0
    [w] => 0
    [category_name] =>
    [tag] =>
    [cat] =>
    [tag_id] =>
    [author_name] =>
    [feed] =>
    [tb] =>
    [paged] => 0
    [comments_popup] =>
    [meta_key] =>
    [meta_value] =>
    [preview] =>
    [s] =>
    [sentence] =>
    [fields] =>
    [category__in] => Array
        (
        )

    [category__not_in] => Array
        (
        )

    [category__and] => Array
        (
        )

    [post__in] => Array
        (
        )

    [post__not_in] => Array
        (
        )

    [tag__in] => Array
        (
        )

    [tag__not_in] => Array
        (
        )

    [tag__and] => Array
        (
        )

    [tag_slug__in] => Array
        (
        )

    [tag_slug__and] => Array
        (
        )

    [meta_query] => Array
        (
        )

    [ignore_sticky_posts] =>
    [suppress_filters] =>
    [cache_results] => 1
    [update_post_term_cache] => 1
    [update_post_meta_cache] => 1
    [posts_per_page] => 100
    [nopaging] =>
    [comments_per_page] => 50
    [no_found_rows] =>
    [order] => DESC
    [orderby] => wp_posts.post_date DESC
)

Have I misunderstood the argument query_var for register_post_type, or why isn’t is sorting the list as I asked for?

Answer 1

I tried modifying the archive page, but that just ended up quering the posts twice, so I hooked up the “parse_query” to add the order by info if the query was the right one.

I may need to define the right one better later, but right now it works fine, and the query is running just once.

add_action('parse_request', 'event_sort');

function event_sort($a)
{
   if($a->query_vars AND count($a->query_vars) == 1 AND $a->query_vars['post_type'] == 'events')
   {
      $a->query_vars['meta_key'] = 'Datum';
      $a->query_vars['orderby'] = 'meta_value';
      $a->query_vars['order'] = 'ASC';
   }
}

Before I found parse_request I used parse_query:

add_action('parse_query', 'event_sort');

function event_sort($a)
{
   if($a->query AND count($a->query) == 1 AND $a->query['post_type'] == 'events')
   {
      global $wp_query;
      $wp_query->set('meta_key', 'Datum');
      $wp_query->set('orderby', 'meta_value');
      $wp_query->set('order', 'ASC');
   }
}