I already applied a custom order for the toplevel navigation of my page, but it doesn’t automatically sort the submenus alphabetically, although i assumed this behavior:
Pages are usually ordered alphabetically, but you can put a number above to change the order pages appear in. (We know this is a little janky, it’ll be better in future releases.)
I implemented the navigation using this line of code:
<?php wp_page_menu( 'sort_column=menu_order' ); ?>
Finally, do I really have to go and manually order my static pages, or should i manually program the order of the menu items?
I think that the My Page Order extension might be what you are looking for.
Also, have you tried:
instead of ‘menu_order’?
Per the Codex, it looks like the title would result in alphabetical sorting?
http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_page_menu