I've been struggling to find the answer to alphabetical child terms of a custom taxonomy ... I wouldn't recommend altering core WP files, so here's what I added to my taxonomy.php file to list out custom taxonomy descriptions, with links to child terms in alphabetical order. Modify to suit your needs, I hope this helps someone out there.
// Get Main Taxonomy for use in template file
$term = get_term_by( 'slug', get_query_var( 'term' ), get_query_var( 'taxonomy' ) );
$termTaxonomy = $term->taxonomy;
<h1><?php echo apply_filters( 'the_title', $term->name ); ?></h1>
<?php // test for description before unleashing a div
if ( !empty( $term->description ) ):
echo '<div class="description">';
echo $term->description;
echo '</div>;
endif; ?>
// Now get children terms, using get_term & 'child_of' get's us alphabetical order
$termchildren = get_terms( $termTaxonomy, array(
'child_of' => $term->term_id,
'hierarchical' => 0,
'fields' => 'ids',
'hide_empty' => 0
) );
// Make an alphabetical linked list
echo '<ul>';
foreach ($termchildren as $child) {
$term = get_term_by( 'id', $child, $termTaxonomy );
// Modify this echo to customize the output for each child term
echo '<li><a href="' . get_term_link( $term->name, $termTaxonomy ) . '" alt="' .$term->description. '">' . $term->name . '</a></li>';
}
echo '</ul>';