How to sort by meta value?

2 comments

1. Your meta value is a serialized array.

   What you’re asking it to get for you is all posts with a meta with the key 'Notes' and the value 'price'. Your meta value is not 'price', though, it’s

   a:6:{s:5:"width";s:3:"580";s:6:"price";s:3:"99"
   

   The first thing you need to do to order by price is to start using a helpful key/value structure. I assume you’re using something like this to store the post meta:

   update_post_meta( $post_id, 'foobar', array( 'width' => 580, 'price' => 99 ), true );
   

   when your needs would indicate that you need to do something like this:

   update_post_meta( $post_id, 'width', 580, true );
   update_post_meta( $post_id, 'price', 99, true );
   

   Once you have your meta values saved in that format, you’re going to want to use a meta_query:

   global $query_string;
   parse_str( $query_string, $my_query );
   $my_query['meta_query'] = array(
       array(
            'key' => 'price',
            'value' => 0,
            'type' => 'SIGNED',
            'compare' => '>=',
       )
   );
   $my_query['orderby'] = 'meta_value_num';
   $my_query['order'] = 'ASC';
   query_posts( $my_query );
   

   Meta queries are new in WordPress 3.1, so you’ll need to be using at least that version to do this.

   Let me know if you run into problems!

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2. Maybe this solution can help you, I needed to control posts sort by meta_key and meta_value on every request so I created a filter this way:

   /**
   * Filter for every the loop request
   * 
   * @param mixed $request
   */
   function request( $request ) {
       $option = $_REQUEST['mysortoption'] ? $_REQUEST['mysortoption'] : 'default';
   
       switch ( strtolower($option) ) {
           case 'most-viewed':
               $request['meta_key'] = 'most-viewed';
               $request['orderby'] = "meta_value";
               break;
           case 'hot':
               $request['orderby'] = 'comment_count';
               break;
           default:
               break;
       }
   
       return $request;
   }
   add_filter('request', 'request');
   

   Ok, this solution is part of a big requirement but what we’re doing here is just intercepting every request, verify is there is a special sort option I added before and apply the corresponding sort by meta.

   Hope this helps you.

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