Title: Reorder Category Posts
Last modified: August 20, 2016

---

# Reorder Category Posts

 *  [sawyerjw](https://wordpress.org/support/users/sawyerjw/)
 * (@sawyerjw)
 * [15 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/reorder-category-posts/)
 * I am trying to reorder posts within a specific category by a precedence value
   assigned by the blog owner. My plugin creates a custom field the key of which
   is the name of the selected category. The user can then assign a numeric priority
   1-10 which is the value of the custom field. When a visitor clicks on a category
   to display the posts associated with that specific category, I want the query
   to order the posts by the priority value (if any). I’ve been searching the docs,
   Google, and everywhere else I can think of and have not been able to find anything
   that works.
 * I’ve added the following function to the pre_get_posts hook:
 *     ```
       // modify query when category page is called
       function process_post_query($query)
       {
       	global $catname;
   
       	if ($query->is_category())
       	{
       		$catname = print_r($query->query_vars['category_name'],true);
   
       		$query->query_vars['meta_key'] = $catname;
   
       		$query->set('orderby','meta_value_num');
       	}
   
       	return $query;
       }
       ```
   
 * If I print_r the $query I can see the meta_key value being assigned correctly
   and the orderby value set as expected, yet the posts are ordered by the default
   reverse chronological order.
 * If I add the following filter to posts_orderby:
 *     ```
       function new_orderby($orderby)
       {
       	global $catname;
   
       	return 'meta_value_num';
       }
       ```
   
 * I get the following message in place of the posts:
 * “Sorry the category you looking for did not exist or already removed by author”
 * I assume I’m missing something simple and fundamental. Any ideas what that might
   be?
 * Thanks in advance.

The topic ‘Reorder Category Posts’ is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [custom field](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/custom-field/)
 * [orderby](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/orderby/)
 * [post order](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/post-order/)
 * [pre_get_posts](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/pre_get_posts/)

 * 0 replies
 * 1 participant
 * Last reply from: [sawyerjw](https://wordpress.org/support/users/sawyerjw/)
 * Last activity: [15 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/reorder-category-posts/)
 * Status: not resolved

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