OMG - that's just a bizarre question, I know. I wasn't sure how to put it.
I was wanting to know if there was a way to "add in" a custom "orderby" into a query_posts function. I've been trying to figure this out for weeks now, and I'm just at a loss.
yes, I know I can follow this tutorial, which I have tried to do it this way as well, but I've been unsuccessful thus far - and basically if I do that, I'm just reinventing the wheel.
What I need to do is order my posts - on my tag archive - by a meta value I've placed in the usermeta table. (I can get it to work with the codex page lined above, but I can't get my tag archive to display correctly - I run into the same issue. I can order by the meta, but now my tag order won't work - so one way or another, something isn't going right).
If I could *just* somehow pull in that meta value into the orderby, it would solve all my problems.
Right now, I'm at this point:
global $wpdb;
$custom = "SELECT * FROM $wpdb->usermeta as um
LEFT JOIN $wpdb->users as u ON um.user_id = u.id
LEFT JOIN $wpdb->posts as p ON um.user_id = p.post_author
AND um.meta_key = 'article_position'
ORDER BY um.meta_value ASC";
//now the query that puts it all together
query_posts('tag='.$tagname.'&showposts=-1&author=-1'.$custom);But of course it's not working. I kind of didn't expect it to, but right now I'm to the point where I'm just trying *anything*. I've even messed with the core query.php file - against my better judgement (it didn't go anywhere, so I changed it back.)
I keep thinking I've seen something like the above before - where you can "inject" a custom something-or-other in the query and it'll still work, but for the life of me I can't recall where. query_vars seems like it might be a possibility, but I don't see an example of it, and the definition doesn't make it too clear to me as to what it does. (Actually, a LOT of stuff on this page looks like, if I knew how to work with it, it might help - but alas I'm not sure what you do with it.)
Anyway, if someone can point me in the right direction, I'd sure appreciate it.
