Create Groups of Ordered Posts in WordPress

Most Drupal developers are familiar with the Nodequeue module.

It gives developers the ability to set up groups of nodes, called "queues". Clients can add nodes to these groups, and use the drag-n-drop interface to order the nodes as desired. It gives clients a lot more control over which items should appear on certain parts of the site.

Like Drupal, the WordPress core is fairly lightweight, and we rely on plugins to achieve additional functionality. There aren't yet WordPress equivalents to powerful Drupal modules like Views and Apache Solr Search, but there's been a lot of progress regarding WP plugin development.

For example, there's a new WordPress plugin that replicates a lot of Nodequeue's functionality. It's called Advanced Custom Sort.

It's a pretty simple concept. You create a group, add posts to that group, sort the posts, then save.

Then, within one of your templates, you tell WordPress to use the group, and it'll display the posts you've chosen in the correct order.