WordPress – Order $posts

Ciao guys,
I’m getting mad with this issue. I have a script in a WP theme that it’s supposed to retrieve some data. It works ok but I need it does the thing in alphabetic mode and this seem to be… quite hard!

I dig into the web looking for plugin with no success and even modifing the core like they say here http://codex.wordpress.org/Alphabetizing_Posts

I need help because I’m stucked. The url where this happen is this: http://www.jre.it/?s=&geo-radius=50&geo-lat=&geo-lng=&categories=0&locations=0&dir-search=yes&post_type=ait-dir-item

If yiu try to press ENTER just in the forst field (Ristorante, Chef, Città) the order is not in alphabetic mode because the first result is “Trippini”.

Here what I have in category.php on themes folder:

{extends $layout}
{block content}
{if $posts}
        <article id="post-{$post->id}" class="{$post->htmlClasses}">
                <header class="entry-header">
                    <h1 class="entry-title">
                        <span>{$category->title}</span>
                    </h1>
                </header>
                {if strlen($category->description) !== 0}
                <div class="entry-content">
                    {!$category->description}
                </div>
                {/if}
        </article><!-- /#post-{$post->id} -->
        {include snippets/content-nav.php location => 'nav-above'}
        {include snippets/content-loop.php posts => $posts}
        {include snippets/content-nav.php location => 'nav-below'}
    {ifset $themeOptions->advertising->showBox4}
    <div id="advertising-box-4" class="advertising-box">
        {!$themeOptions->advertising->box4Content}
    </div>
    {/ifset}
{else}
    {include snippets/nothing-found.php}
{/if}
{/block}

And this is the code of content-loop-dir-search.php that seem to be the result page:

{foreach $posts as $item}
{first}<ul class="items">{/first}
    <li class="item clear{ifset $item->packageClass} {$item->packageClass}{/ifset}">
        {if $item->thumbnailDir}
        <div class="thumbnail">
            <a href="{!$item->link}"><img src="{timthumb src => $item->thumbnailDir, w => 100, h => 100}" alt="{__ 'Item thumbnail'}"></a>
        </div>
        {/if}
        <div class="description">
            <h3>
                <a href="{!$item->link}">Ristorante {$item->post_title}</a>
            </h3>
                <?php
                //var_dump($options);
                global $wpdb;
                $sql = "SELECT meta_value FROM ".$wpdb->prefix."postmeta WHERE post_id=".$item->ID." AND meta_key LIKE '%_ait%'";
                $itemMeta = $wpdb->get_results($sql);
                $itemMetaValue = unserialize($itemMeta[0]->meta_value);
                //var_dump($itemMetaValue);
                echo
                "Chef: ".$itemMetaValue['nome-chef']." ".$itemMetaValue['cognome-chef']."<br/>"
                .$itemMetaValue['address']."<br/>"
                .$itemMetaValue['cap']." ".$itemMetaValue['citta']." (".$itemMetaValue['provincia'].")<br/>"
                ."T: ".$itemMetaValue['telephone']."<br/>";
                ?>
        </div>
        <hr class="bg" />
    </li>
{last}</ul>{/last}
{/foreach}

Thanks everybody for your help.

CM