Ordering children pages by custom date field

Support
1

Hi !
I’ve got a problem that I can’t find a solution for…

I’ve got a website site with differents articles entries that are all childrens of the “home” page.
On the website, I would like them to be sorted by a custom date field defined in the blueprint of articles as “header.datearticle”.

At first, I tried to do this in the template :

  {% for post in page.find('/home').children.published.order('header.datearticle', 'desc') %}
    [Some code]
  {% endfor %}

But it didn’t work, because "header.datearticle’ return a string instead of a date object, and that my dates are dd-mm-yyyy hh:mm, so the ordering is not good.

I tried to do something like
{% for post in page.find('/home').children.published.order('post.header.datearticle|date("U")', 'desc') %}

to change the date to unix time, but it seems that the order function doesn’t accept this like this.

Then I thought that maybe I should have change the blueprint of home to ask to change the order of children with something like

content:
    order:
        by: header.datearticle
        dir: asc

But it doesn’t change anything and I don’t know why. Should “Folder Numeric Prefix” be removed before applying custom order like this ? (I did remove it also, but didn’t change anything).

I’m a bit stuck and I don’t know what to do…

2

Rather than using Grav’s limited sort operation which is designed for simple header values (not expressions based on them), maybe try Twig’s sort filter instead. Something like:

{% for post in page.find('/home').children|sort(post.header.datearticle|date("U"))|reverse %}

I think that should work. I added Twig’s reverse filter because sort doesn’t seem to support a direction parameter.

3

That’s an excellent idea, I think it should work, but I can’t manage to : /

If I use exactly what you wrote I get an error :
An exception has been thrown during the rendering of a template ("Undefined index: post").
If I remove “post”, or even “post.header”, it doesn’t seems to work at all. Even switch from with “|reverse” or without doesn’t have any effect. I guess it’s what happened if the sort function doesn’t apply well ?

4

So, I found a solution, not the most elegant but it seems to work.
I kept my previous
{% for post in page.find('/home').children.published.order('header.datearticle', 'desc') %}
And I changed the blueprint of articles to save the date in the format Y-m-d instead of d-m-Y. This way, even if it orders strings, it’s ok.

5

OK glad you solved it.

It was obvious to me that the date format was the whole problem. I didn’t even even bother mentioning it because I got the impression from your question that this was something out of your control or difficult to change.

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