Symphony.

Is something like this possible:

I have a field in the admin called "Order" which obviously tells xslt what order to put that entry in.

Say I have 5 entries (labeled A, B, C, D, E) that have correct order information from 1 to 5 (A = 1, B = 2, C = 3, D = 4, E = 5).

Now, say I want to change entry E to be put to the front, so i would change the order value to 1 to bring it to the top. So that works great, as long as the xslt is written correctly. However, the only issue with this is that there will be more than one entry with the Order value = 1 at this point (A = 1, B = 2, C = 3, D = 4, E = 1).

My question is, is it possible to affect other entries and modify their Order value when a different entry order value is changed? So then the Order value for the entries would be like this: (A = 2, B = 3, C = 4, D = 5, E = 1). if you have ever used the Netflix queue, this is pretty much the exact same concept.

This isn't a useful suggestion in terms of modifying Symphony, but I've used a quick fix in the past. Rather than 1, use 100. 2 = 200, 3 = 300 and so on. To move E to the top, give it a value of anything between 1 and 99. It should allow you enough ordering variation for a long time, if you only reorder items infrequently.

Alternatively you could use 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 etc.

I had a similar thought the other day which I've been meaning to suggest to the Symphonians.

The Pages page allows a user to re-order the page rows. Could this functionality be replicated in Publush pages? Could every section entry have an additional hidden system field called System Order (as it does a System ID and System Date), which allows a user to drag/re-order section entries and auto-save the value? This would be exposed as a field to sort on in Data Sources, and would remove the need for a developer to manually add an Order field to every section.

The problem arrises when viewing section entries and the list is paged and/or sorted by a particular field. Perhaps the System Order could always be visible (or configurable) and you can only drag/re-order when the entries are sorted by this column.

thanks for the suggestion nick. the client and i were talking about the same way you were to compensate for the ordering issue. but i would rather not have to have them enter in some arbitrary number if it can be avoided.

I think others (myself included) have talked/mentioned having the same reordering functionality as pages currently do but in other areas of the admin. could there possibly be some way to make it so that if you do reorder you entries by different columns, that the order value itself is not affected, but only affect by dragging an entry into a different position than its original one?

it is also a good idea, like you mentioned, to only be able to make things re-arrangeable when the entries are ordered only by the "order" column.