[Plugin: TheCartPress, E-Commerce for WordPress Stores] Sorting products

Shortly after adding that “+0” to the code, I added some product tags and put the taxonomy widget in the sidebar. I clicked on my new tags and sorted by price (I put the code from the Order Panel widget into my loop-tcp-grid). This is when things didn’t look right. I had several products with a zero price suddenly.

I looked at my product list in the back-end and figured out that it was the products with the new tags that I had just displayed sorted by price that had a zero. And I had just put that +0 fix in.

So I edited all those products and set the values. It turns out all the meta values were gone on those. I took the +0 back out of the code. I then clicked on the same links as before and had no problems, sorted by price too (although it sorts wrong). I then put the +0 back in the code and clicked around again. I couldn’t get it to misbehave. It all looks good (and sorts correctly).

Since I couldn’t find the reason for the loss of data, I suspect there is still some bug lurking in the code.
Just thought I’d let you know…

Why can’t you use the conditional template functions to determine if you should apply your sort?

if (is_tax('tcp_product_tag') || is_tax('tcp_product_category') || is_tax('tcp_product_supplier'))
 ...do your orderby...

Or at least make the sort optional?

Sensei,
This method of sorting causes a problem when using a TCP loop in a page or a sidebar. There is no way to tell that loop to come out in a different order than the user chose.
I want to put a list of products on my home page, so I generated a shortcode and the products show up. But they are in whatever order I last chose on the category page. I want them in the order I specified in the backend.

I’ve been trying to get this to work on the front page on the 1.0.9 beta.
I just realized that you put the conditional tags into your parseRequest function, so now you only respond to the user trying to change the sort on a tcp_product taxonomy page. But me trying to put a list of products on the home page is still affected by your ordering (whatever was chosen last).

I think it’s a bad practice to ignore a request variable that’s there (only available sometimes). I would remove the conditional from parseRequest. This might be what is causing it to now take 2 clicks of the sort button (Order in the Order Panel) to get it to sort, even though you can be on a list page. It redraws the screen, but the products are not sorted. The second time I click, the products are sorted.