Question

In the function below, the $myrecentposts variable holds a collection of the 5 latest posts. How can I take these 5 posts and reorder them before they are written to the for-loop so that they are ordered by their post-title index in the array?

function getLatestPostsAndSort($post)
{
    $myrecentposts = get_posts(
        array('post__not_in' => get_option('sticky_posts'), 
        'numberposts' => 5
    )
 //NEED TO RESORT THE ARRAY HERE BY [POST-TITLE]
    foreach($myrecentposts as  $idxrecent=>$post)
    {   
    ?><li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li><?php 
    }
}

PS: the obvious suggestion might be to pull them from the database in the desired order. However, the get_posts() method offers no such option. The default order is by post date (latest first). If I change the order to “title”, it does not take post date into consideration and rather just pulls the entire post collection and orders them by title.

Answer 1

Generally speaking, you can sort an array like:

usort($myrecentposts, function($a, $b) {
   return strcmp($a['title'], $b['title']); 
});

You need to adjust title to be whatever the actual name of the key is.

If this is wordpress, then based on a quick Google search, it looks like it might be:

usort($myrecentposts, function($a, $b) {
   return strcmp($a->post_title, $b->post_title); 
});

If you don’t have PHP 5.3, then you’ll need to move that anonymous function into a real one like:

function sort_post_by_title($a, $b) {
   return strcmp($a->post_title, $b->post_title); 
}
usort($myrecentposts, 'sort_post_by_title');