Steven Zahm@ David and Kim
My apologies but this is going to be long.
I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon investigating ways to accomplish this effectively. One thing I learned … most of the plugins that do this for the core WordPress posts categories (any taxonomy) I could never recommend. It seems the majority of them add additional column to the core terms table. Altering core tables like this, one word, bad. What if WordPress ever updates its db structure (which btw they are planning it). This could leave you in a situation where you would not be able to update or the update trashing the db because of an unexpected structure. Any way… apologies for going off topic.
It seems the best way to do this would to do it how this plugin does it with the WP core categories (no, it will not work with Connections, sorry). It creates a term meta table and stores the order there. What’s great about this approach is any arbitrary data then can be assigned to a category, ie images. Basically infinitely extensible.
The downside would this would cause additional db queries which will have an affect on page loads in the realm of ~hundredth of a second per category (this would include the time required to do a post query quicksort to put them in order). The plugins that add to the core terms table would not suffer this effect but as mentioned, could be very risky, and is limited to only adding the order, no other data.
What I was originally thinking for @ Dave was a shortcode option, lets call it category_order. I was think it would be used to manually set the order like so:
[connections category_order='2,5,6,1,8,10']
The numbers represent the category ID as found on the Connections : Category admin page.
The downsides (and they are large downsides) with this approach would be, only the categories listed in the shortcode would be shown and the hierarchy would be lost. So @ Kim, this would not be a workable solution for you. Additionally anytime you added and removed a category you would have to go back and edit the shortcode accordingly. For @ Dave, even with those limitations it seems like a workable solution.
My preference would to be to add the terms meta table to the core Connections plugin and create an extension to set the category order. Now custom development is not cheap. We’re looking at a $150 to $200 from the each of you with me crossing my fingers that sales of the extension would have enough interest to recoup the rest of the cost. The cost is high because there is quite a bit of work and time involved in adding a new table and the supporting functions for reading and writing to it.