We manage very large Joomla installations, and a constant question we get from editors working on these websites is: “I am trying to order articles on my website, but it is not working, how do we do that?”
And then we start to explain that first they need to choose the category when listing articles in the backend, and then they need to click on the arrow next to the first checkbox to sort descending, and finally they need to drag and drop articles to sort them. It feels awkward every time we explain the process, because we know that it is confusing and that there must be a better way of doing this order (keep in mind that there is an extra step for many others, and it is clearing the Joomla cache – our clients don’t need to go through this step because we have a plugin that will automatically clear the cache for them). In our opinion, the ordering should be done at the article level, and not using a drag and drop.
Each article must have 2 ordering fields: “Order on the homepage” and “Order on the category”. “Order on the homepage” will be a dropdown that will dictate the ordering of the article on the homepage, “Order on the category” will be a dropdown that will dictate the ordering of the article on the category page (the category that the article belongs to). This will get rid of the “drag and drop” confusion, which, in our opinion, is a major drawback in Joomla and one of the main reasons why people go elsewhere.
We hope you found this post useful and informative. If you are interested in becoming one of our clients, then please contact us. Our fees are right, our work is clean, and we are fully dedicated to our clients!