How to quickly reorder posts in the admin panel that will persist for the wp-api

Question

I generally use the Intuitive Custom Post Order plugin for any WordPress sites I work with so clients can order their posts visually.

For this project, I'm using WordPress as an admin panel and consuming it's data with an Ember.js front-end.

(using wp-api V.2) The re-ordered order doesn't show in the JSON and I'm guessing the plugin stores the new order in an in-between piece of PHP.

Besides manually changing the date of each post, what are my options to allow my client an intuitive way to re-order posts in a way that persists?

Answer 1

Let's assume it stores the custom order into the menu_order column in the wp_posts table.

If you mean the hierarchical page post type (supports page-attributes) then one can order with the query variables:

/wp-json/wp/v2/pages/?orderby=menu_order&order=asc

If you mean the post post type with:

/wp-json/wp/v2/posts/

there's a way using the rest_{post_type}_query filter:

/**
 * Set orderby to 'menu_order' for the 'post' post type
 */
add_filter( "rest_post_query", function( $args, $request )
{
    $args['orderby'] = 'menu_order';
    return $args;
}, 10, 2 );

We might want to restrict this further. Skimming through the WP_REST_Request class we can see there's a handy get_param() public method that we could make use of:

/**
 * Support for 'wpse_custom_order=menu_order' for the 'post' post type
 */
add_filter( "rest_post_query", function( $args, $request )
{
    if( 'menu_order' === $request->get_param( 'wpse_custom_order' ) )
        $args['orderby'] = 'menu_order';

    return $args;
}, 10, 2 );

where we activate it through a custom wpse_custom_order parameter:

/wp-json/wp/v2/posts/?wpse_custom_order=menu_order&order=asc

There's also the dynamically generated rest_query_var-orderby filter.

Answer 2

Ordering posts with menu_order as orderby parameter will give invalid parameter error e.g.

http://example.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts?orderby=menu_order&order=asc

Invalid parameter(s): orderby (orderby is not one of date, id, include, title, slug)

At this time there's no filter to add another orderby option https://github.com/WP-API/WP-API/blob/2.0-beta13/lib/endpoints/class-wp-rest-posts-controller.php#L1666

you should hook at posts_clauses for example

/**
 * Class Custom_Rest
 * @author 
 */
class Custom_Rest
{
    /**
     * init 
     * Add Rest Hooks
     *
     * @return void
     * @author 
     */
    public static function init()
    {
        add_filter( 'posts_clauses' , 'Custom_Rest::orderby' );
    }


    /**
     * orderby
     * Order posts by menu_order
     *
     * @return void
     * @author 
     */
    public static function orderby($v) {

        if ( $GLOBALS['wp']->query_vars['rest_route'] == '/wp/v2/posts' ) {
            // old value is  "wp_posts.post_date DESC"
            $v['orderby'] = str_replace('post_date', 'menu_order', $v['orderby']);
            return $v;
        }

    }

}


add_action( 'rest_api_init', 'Custom_Rest::init' );