Dev Logging

Posted On June 17, 2023

I wanted to stat a Dev Log for a VR project I am working on but was always frustrated that individual posts in WordPress are presented in reverse chronological order, making is so a “story” appears to run backwards. I asked ChatGPT for some ideas and it suggested:

1. Using a Plugin: There are plugins like “Post Types Order” and “WP Query Order” that allow you to easily change the order of posts in categories through the WordPress admin interface.
2. Modify the Theme’s functions.php File: You can also change the order by adding code to your theme’s functions.php file.
3. Create a Category Template: If you want to change the order only for specific categories, you can create a category template. Create a file called category-your_category_slug.php in your theme’s directory and use a custom query to display posts in chronological order.

Initially, I thought the idea of a plugin was easier than trying to hack the functions.php file, but each of the plugins I looked at (briefly) seemed to offer “drag & drop” resorting, but I just wanted to change the sort order by date. (I may regret this as I now realize if I update a post, I need to remember to maintain the old date to keep the order)

Just for the record, the one plugin I tried was “Post Types Order” and to be fair, I played with it for all of 5 minutes.

While trying to find a code syntax highlighter, I stumbled across “Code Snippets”, a plugin that allows you to effectively update the functions.php from the admin panel. With this, I added the code snippet that ChatGPT provided with option 2:

function chronologically_ordered_category( $query ) {
    if ( $query->is_category() && $query->is_main_query() ) {
        $query->set( 'orderby', 'date' );
        $query->set( 'order', 'ASC' );
    }
}
add_action( 'pre_get_posts', 'chronologically_ordered_category' );

With this, when my Categories are viewed, they are in the desired chronological order.