I am trying to workout the best way to do a slightly abnormal orderby.

I have a query that returns 2 types (Post and Event). As expected by default it orders both, together, by publish date.

What I want is, posts to be ordered by publish date, events by event->start_date

I could just get them, loop over them and manually sort myself, but that seems counter intuitive.

Any help much appreceiated.

Cheers

Drogo

I am trying to workout the best way to do a slightly abnormal orderby.

I have a query that returns 2 types (Post and Event). As expected by default it orders both, together, by publish date.

What I want is, posts to be ordered by publish date, events by event->start_date

I could just get them, loop over them and manually sort myself, but that seems counter intuitive.

Any help much appreceiated.

Cheers

Drogo

• wp-query
• order

2 Answers 2

You can do this by adding these two lines in your query:

'orderby' => 'publish_date',
'order' => 'ASC',

In the code below I assume that event->start_date is a post meta field on the Event post type.

'orderby' => array(
    'meta_value'   => 'ASC',
    'publish_date' => 'DESC'
),
'meta_key'  => 'start_date',
'meta_type' => 'DATE',

This assumes that the Posts don't have the start_date meta set, ie, that it's only present for the Events. Also I've assumed you want the Events in ascending order by their start_date and the Posts in descending publish_date order.

Reference

• WP_Query Order/Order By