How can I sort the featured blog posts in the top of the list in Octobercms

Question

My request is simple. I want to keep my blog list ordered by created_at DESC but I want also to show the featured posts in top.

Let's say that I have 4 categories : Gold, Silver, Bronze and Other ...

I want to display the Gold posts first.

Then the Silver posts.

Followed by the Bronze posts.

And finally the others.

All of them should be ordered by created_at DESC.

Is there a feature out of the box to do that ?
Or should I create a new plugin to extend Blog with this feature ?

What do you think ?

@CaddyDZ, Is the desired behavior and the specific problem here are not clear ? I'm not sure if this feature is covered by the CMS or should be implemented in a new Plugin. I even gave an example .. so ... ! — Zied Hf, Oct 06 '19 at 01:58
You're asking for a feature implementation with no starting point whatsoever, please edit your question and show us what you have tried so far — Salim Djerbouh, Oct 06 '19 at 02:05

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 06 '19 at 08:32

I am assuming you are using the Rainlab Blog plugin. There are numerous ways to solve this and I don't think there is an official "way". Here are some examples that you will have to fit for your own code.

Solution with Twig. Twig has a sort filter which you can pass in an arrow function, check here. Then you can do if statements to display gold to bronze.
```
{% for blog in blogs|sort((a, b) => a.created_at <=> b.created_at) %}
{% if blog.category == Gold %}{{ blog }}{% endif %}
{% endfor %}
```
Adhoc CMS Page. Instead of using the rain blag component you can use the plugin in the PHP Code to the page/layout/partial. This is where give you the ability to work with the model to organize it the way you want to. Here I am using OctoberCMS querying features.
```
use Rainlab\Blog\Models\Post;

public function onStart() {
    $this['golds'] = Post::whereHas('categories', function ($query) {
        $query->where('name', 'Gold');
    })->get()->sortBy('create_at');
}
```
Third way and the way I recommend is to build your own plugin which can either extend or filter the blogs posts like how I did in the CMS Page example. Read the documentation here.

One side note that if you click into the {% component 'something' %} you can expand the htm template.

So helpful. This is what I was looking for. Thank you. – Zied Hf Oct 06 '19 at 15:57 — Zied Hf, Oct 06 '19 at 15:57

How can I sort the featured blog posts in the top of the list in Octobercms

1 Answers1