sorting articles by something other than date created

I’ve been trying to sort articles by something other than the date created; e.g. menu order or published date. I’m hoping this will mean the administrator can move articles around and have more control over the order their news articles are shown in. However I can’t seem to get sortBy or orderBy to work ... everything else seems to in my code such as parent id but I’ve tried both of these and they don’t work. Is it the right parameter I’m using???

Ditto can sort by any document or template variable. Try using the orderBy:

Otherwise you can use the old syntax:

well i don’t know what i was trying last night but it was very similar to your code but didn’t work no matter what i did. however having copied your code in it works perfectly; it may well have been the apostrophes i was using not slanting the right way or something!!! anyway, thank you thank you thank you .. in 2 minutes you’ve helped me with something i spent frustratingly too long on!!

The most common error is using single quotes ’ rather than back ticks ` in the snippet parameter.

Quote from: pipedragon72 at Apr 07, 2009, 05:24 PM

I’ve been trying to sort articles by something other than the date created; e.g. menu order or published date. I’m hoping this will mean the administrator can move articles around and have more control over the order their news articles are shown in. However I can’t seem to get sortBy or orderBy to work ... everything else seems to in my code such as parent id but I’ve tried both of these and they don’t work. Is it the right parameter I’m using???

Are you using MySQL Version 5.0.51? It has a bug that would explain what you’re experiencing.