wordpress custom_meta ordering of timestamps

Question

So I have a wp meta query that is handling the searching of events which have a start timestamp, and an end timestamp, I want to return all results within the two dates a user picks in the search. This part is working fine as of now.

However, I want to sort the results by the start timestamp, so the most recent events show up first.

$args = array(
    's' => $_GET['k'],
    'post_type' => 'event',
    'posts_per_page' => '-1',
    'post_status' => array( 'private','publish' ),

    'meta_key' =>'_start_ts',
    'orderby' => 'meta_value_num',
    'order' => 'asc',

    'meta_query' => array(
        'relation' => 'OR',
        array(
            'key' => '_end_ts',
            'value' => array(strtotime($_GET['d1']),strtotime($_GET['d2'])),
            'compare' => 'BETWEEN',
            'type' => 'NUMERIC'
        ),
        array(
            'key' => '_start_ts',
            'value' => array(strtotime($_GET['d1']),strtotime($_GET['d2'])),
            'compare' => 'BETWEEN',
            'type' => 'NUMERIC'
        )
    )
);

If I seach for all events in the month of april, we get the following timestamp ordering:

1397865600, 1398211200, 1398384000, 1397520000, 1398297600

how do I get wordpress to sort by _start_ts?

Answer 1

Maybe I'm looking too simply, but your code sets the order_by for the query here:

'orderby' => 'meta_value_num',

If you change that to "post_date" it should put them in date order, though you may want to look at the other sorting options here:

WordPress get_posts function