[Cole Schweikhardt]

Steve, within the law firm site we’ve communicated on a number of times, we are using the List widget to deliver the Attorneys in each category (Partner, Of Counsel, etc) in the right sidebar of individual profiles and the main Attorneys grid.

Being a law firm, everyone is ordered by seniority. We added a custom field “order” to make this happen in the grid and directory.

However, is there a way we can make the list widget to the same?

You can see how the Attorneys grid page and this widget are working now right here: http://ccshkt.com/our-attorneys/

[Steven Zahm]

@ Cole

Well, the only way to do that would be to change the PHP which sets the default sort order in the widget to be sort on the order meta key/value. You would have to open the class.widget-list.php file found here:
../wp-content/plugins/connections-widgets/includes/

Look for this line:
'order_by' => $instance['randomize'] ? 'id|RANDOM' : array( 'sort_column', 'last_name', 'first_name' ),

Change it to this:
'order_by' => $instance['randomize'] ? 'id|RANDOM' : 'meta_key:order|NUMERIC_ASC',

Save and overwrite the original file.

For increased permanence the widgets are cached so you will not see the change take effect until after the fragment caches expires. You can force it to expire by making a settings change on the Widgets admin page.

Hope that helps! Let me know.

[Cole Schweikhardt]

Thanks Steve. I was afraid it would require editing the widget.

Question: When we update Connections in the future, will we need to re-edit that widget each time?

We’ve made so many tweaks here and there, I have to keep track so we don’t suddenly break the functionality with a simple update.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Cole

re: When we update Connections in the future, will we need to re-edit that widget each time?

No, only when the Widget Pack is updated.

re: We’ve made so many tweaks here and there, I have to keep track so we don’t suddenly break the functionality with a simple update.

A quick scan over topics/replies it appears the only changes were shortcode options (sorting by the meta key/value) and a minor CSS tweak added to a custom CSS plugin for the Gridder template. So far seems like updates should be pretty safe to do unless I missed something a bit more critical than that.

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