[david1134]

Hello,

I installed Custom Entry Order extension to “fake” an alphabetical listing of entries after a keyword search of the membership directory. I assigned a sort order of 1 to all A entries, a 2 to all B entries, and so on throughout the alphabet. It’s not alphabetical within each letter, but close enough.

However, the custom entry order then causes a problem with a widget which is intended to show the organization’s newest members. The widget is set to sort by date added, but since fixing my other issue (the keyword search), now the widget shows me the most recent additions starting with A (followed by the most recent additions starting with B, and so on.)

So — my question is Can I override the custom entry order in the shortcode of the widget? It would be awesome to have a flag to turn that off. Something like

enable_custom_sort=‘false’

Is there any way around this? I’m hoping to find a solution that doesn’t require the client to change the widget every time she adds a new member.

[Steven Zahm]

@ David

RE: my question is Can I override the custom entry order in the shortcode of the widget?

Sorry, there is no way to disable the Custom Entry Order per instance. It is applied globally.

I can not think of a way around it as there are no actions I could hook into to add/remove the custom ordering for specific instances. It does make sense that the recently added and modified widgets should not be affected.

The best I can offer at the moment is that I’ll look into it and see what can be done.

[david1134]

Thanks, I appreciate your reply. One thing occurred to me – would it maybe be possible to use “Custom Category Order” in some way? If I created a category for each letter, could I use that to sort all listings A-Z — then remove the “Custom Entry Order” so that the widget displays properly? Or can I combine those two extensions in some way you can think of that might accomplish the same thing?

[Steven Zahm]

@ David

Sorry, no using Custom Category Order will have no effect on how the entries are ordered. It is used only for changing the order in which the categories are displayed.

[david1134]

Okay, thank you. Well, for now I’ve just grabbed the most recently added entries and using shortcode to display them. I assume all new entry IDs will be added in numerical order? So for example, if the last 3 items are 87, 88, and 89, the next three entries will be 90, 91, 92? If that’s the case, at least it will be easy to swap out the ID numbers as new members are added to the list.

[Steven Zahm]

@ David

The ID should increment sequentially. Though, this like core WP posts/pages, the ID are auto assigned by the database. So, there are no guarantees, but, in practice it should be fine.

[Steven Zahm]

@ David

So, I’m looking into this… which widget are you using?

[david1134]

Hi Steven,

Thanks for checking it out. I’m just using a text widget with the shortcode in it. (Right now it’s manually listing by ID # as a work-around.)

[connections id='2047,2046,2045' order_by="id|SPECIFIED' enable_category_select=false
enable_pagination=true page_limit=3 pagination_position=false enable_search=false show_alphaindex=FALSE show_alphahead=FALSE
address_types=false link_types=false email_types=false enable_map=false]

(I think I tried it with Custom HTML, too.)

[Steven Zahm]

@ David

Which Connections Widget were you using before you switched to using the Text Widget / Shortcode?

I think I have a relatively easy change I can make to Custom Entry Order, but I need to know the context in which you were using the original widget so make sure I am looking into this correctly.

[david1134]

To tell the truth, I’m not sure I’ve ever used anything but the text widget. Until you said that, I’m not even sure I realized there was a connections widget made by you. Or I knew it at one time and forgot it. (So that’s embarrassing!)

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