Create list of posts showing post meta and title – ordered by meta asc

Hi there.

I’ve been trying to work out how to do this to no avail mainly as I am having trouble understanding the following two support posts:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/142787?replies=16

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/96851?replies=5

I think I am a bit out of my depth with the php and sql query end of this.

I have a feeling that I am attempting to do something very similar to the first support link above.

I am working on a website for a non-profit organisation in Ireland and they have a resource library of downloads relating to preventing gender based violence.

You can see a sample of it here:

http://www.gbv.ie/category/resource-library/make-prevention-and-protection-central-to-programming/

As you can see, I have a list of all posts in each category. They have requested that these posts are ordered by Organisation/Author, then year, then title.

So I am using post_meta to get the necessary information associated with each post

<ul>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
  <li><?php $key="authors";	echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true);?> (<?php the_time('Y');?>) <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<?php endwhile; ?>
</ul>

This gives a display of Author (Year) Title

However, using:

$posts = query_posts($query_string . '&orderby=title&order=asc&posts_per_page=-1');

to order the posts will obviously order by the post titles.

So my basic understanding of the previously mentioned support topics is that I need to do some custom queries to $wpdb and join the necessary meta_key to the post title, thereby allowing my “&orderby=title” to work as planned?

I think I’m probably waaaay off here, but this is my guess as to what I should be looking to do!

<ul>
<?php if (in_category('7')) {
$pageposts = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT wp_posts.* FROM wp_posts INNER JOIN wp_postmeta author ON (wp_posts.meta_key = 'author') INNER JOIN wp_postmeta year ON (wp_posts.meta_key = 'year') ORDER BY author.meta_value ASC;
if ($pageposts) : foreach ($pageposts as $post): setup_postdata($post); ?>
<li><?php $key="authors";	echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true);?> (<?php the_time('Y');?>) <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<?php endforeach;?>
<?php endif; } ?>
</ul>

Additional Information:

Category Layout:
Resource Library
– sub categories
— some sub sub categories

All posts are in_category(‘7’) which is the resource library, as well as whichever sub, or sub-sub category is necessary.

This allows me to use one file “category.php” which has an:

if (in_category('7')) {//use special code } else {//use standard category display};

So yeah. I’m hugely confused, and, well, they’re having a charity dinner thing on Friday and the site needs to be sorted by then so I’m starting to stress out! Any help would be hugely appreciated.