Post Meta: Category Sort

Hi everyone,

I’ve done some extensive searches and can’t seem to find any answers on this one…

I’m using WP locally to project manage designing a WP site (and it works extremely well). I use numeric prefixes on my category and sub-category names to group them as I want. Currently running with 8 parent cats containing 70 child cats and it’s rising all the time. It’s not unusual for a post to belong to at *least* 8 categories, frequently more.

Sorting all of the cats/sub-cats in the sidebar is just fine with wp_list_cats(). But how do you get a similar sort function output for the post meta?

Neither the_category() or get_the_category() seem to be designed to do it and I can’t find any other functions that do it. Unless I’m missing something.

This is a REAL headache because an alpha sorted category list in the post meta is much easier to scan as I can immediately see how to track it and more importantly I can see straightaway if a post belongs to a child cat and I’ve forgotten to include the parent cat…

Any help gratefully received.
Best Regards,
FurrTrap