Title: Complex Orderby
Last modified: August 22, 2016

---

# Complex Orderby

 *  [imanewbe](https://wordpress.org/support/users/imanewbe/)
 * (@imanewbe)
 * [11 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/complex-orderby/)
 * I have a list of movies where the year and imdbTitle are stored in postmeta.
 * I need to sort
    1. By year
    2. By imdbTitle and post_title by relavence to the search “the rundown”
    3. By post_content
 * Here are my args for query_posts
 *     ```
       Array
       (
           [offset] => 0
           [meta_query] => Array
               (
               )
   
           [s] => the rundown
           [orderby] => meta_value_num
           [meta_key] => year
           [order] => asc
       )
       ```
   
 * I hook into post_where and add
 *     ```
       $where .= " OR ({$wpdb->postmeta}.meta_key = 'imdbTitle' AND {$wpdb->postmeta}.meta_value LIKE '%".get_search_query()."%')";
       ```
   
 * which allows the imdbTitle to be search for as well as the post_title
 * I’ve then hooked into the posts_orderby and added the following sql
 *     ```
       (CASE
           WHEN
               wp_posts.post_title LIKE '%the rundown%' OR
               wp_postmeta.meta_value LIKE '%the rundown%' THEN 1
           WHEN
               (wp_posts.post_title LIKE '%the%' AND
               wp_posts.post_title LIKE '%rundown%' ) OR
               (wp_postmeta.meta_value LIKE '%the%' AND
               wp_postmeta.meta_value LIKE '%rundown%' ) THEN 2
           WHEN
               wp_posts.post_title LIKE '%the%' OR
               wp_postmeta.meta_value LIKE '%the%' OR
               wp_posts.post_title LIKE '%rundown%' OR
               wp_postmeta.meta_value LIKE '%rundown%' THEN 3
           WHEN
               wp_posts.post_content LIKE '%the rundown%' THEN 4
           ELSE 5
       END)
       ```
   
 * This is added to the end of the order by which also has this at the start
 *     ```
       wp_postmeta.meta_value+0 ASC,
       ```
   
 * I think the issue is wp_postmeta.meta_value+0 ASC because both the year and imdbTitle
   are postmeta.
 * Is there a way to get around this? Or a better way to do this?

The topic ‘Complex Orderby’ is closed to new replies.

 * 0 replies
 * 1 participant
 * Last reply from: [imanewbe](https://wordpress.org/support/users/imanewbe/)
 * Last activity: [11 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/complex-orderby/)
 * Status: not resolved

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