marksbrain

Is the date system just handled by future-dating posts? Or are there new values (in custom fields or something) assigned to the post? I ask because I’d like to use it to back-date posts that cover historical events that took place before 1970 (which is the last year that PHP or MySQL can handle.)

I’m trying to use WordPress to make a timeline of historical events, where a post describing something that took place on June 1 1912 would automatically be ordered after something that took place on January 2 1543 and before something that took place on June 2 1912.

Could EventPress accomplish that?

Okay, so I think you wouldn’t really need to use the Get Custom Field Values Plugin, because it seems there are now lots of ways to get at custom fields without using a plugin, as described here.

In fact, that page tells us something very interesting:

The PostMeta information is stored in a new table, $wpdb->postmeta. This table has four fields:

meta_id: A unique id for each entry
post_id: The ID of the post for this metadata
meta_key: The name of the ‘key’
meta_value: The value associated with the key

The values from this table are pulled into a structured multi-dimensional array called $post_meta_cache, just after the $posts array is fetched in wp-blog-header.php. This variable will only contain values for the list of posts fetched for the current page build.

Cool. So, since the information is already there, it seems there would have to be a way to order by the meta_values assocated with a given meta_key. Right?

But what is it?

I think a lot of people would really dig it if we could come up with a way to do this. It would allow you to sort things in all kinds of useful ways.

In a site with reviews about music, you could have a meta_key:genre and sort by the meta_values:rock, hip hop, folk, blues, etc.

In a site about future or past events, you could have meta_keys: Year, month, and day; and sort by the meta_values assigned to them.

Figuring this out would do a lot to make WordPress into even more of a mult-functional CMS. Custom fields have got to be more useful than just telling the world your mood. Anyone care to help out?

Okay, I’ve done some further research and I’m thinking there must be a way to get this to work using some combination of this type of code…

{
$q[‘orderby’] = ‘????’;
$q[‘order’] = ‘ASC’;
}

(which I found here.)

…and the Get Custom Field Values Plugin

But how it would actually work is beyond me.

Anyone who knows more than me care to give a brother a hand?

I wonder that as well. My hunch is that the answer is no, because if it were possible everyone would be doing it and there would be some record of it on the Internet. (I’ve searched!) I think it doesn’t work because custom fields are metadata or something like that.

Anyone smarter than Xander and I care to weigh in?