There are no built in options to sort alphabetically but V5 has an extensive adoption of WP style hooks (actions and filters) and one of these is available that can change the sort order. So – it just needs a few small lines of code. Do you know you way around filters and php?

Yellow Swordfish said

There are no built in options to sort alphabetically but V5 has an extensive adoption of WP style hooks (actions and filters) and one of these is available that can change the sort order. So – it just needs a few small lines of code. Do you know you way around filters and php?

I’m fairly competent at php but would need to read up on WP filters but that does’t sound too daunting, its onnly code & logic.

Cheers

Will

It is actually very simple. A filter works by passing a piece of data to your function. You can then optionally massage/change that data and send it back.

In this case the filter is called ‘sph_forumview_query’ and it passes an object of the different components of the sql statement that makes up the topic list query in forum view. One of the properties of that data object is ‘orderby’.

So basically you could add a filter, change the sort order and send it back.

Something like –

add_filter('sph_forumview_query', 'my_sort_function');
function my_sort_function($sqlObj) {
    $sqlObj->orderby = SFTOPICS . '.topic_name ASC';
    return $sqlObj;
}

Put that code in the spFunctions.php of the V5 theme you are using and topics will show alphabetically starting with the ‘A’s.

A few things: (1) In this state this will apply to ALL Forums when displaying the Forum View. (2) As always we recommend making your own theme (copy) before making changes to avoid them being lost on an update and (3) bear in mind that sorting by the topic name string will always be slower than the current sort on numeric key columns.