On the page hidden link we want to do a custom order on the testimonials displayed via the view 'filterable testimonials'.
Right now the initial query returns: Marilee Seymour, Laurie W., and then Maryanne DeAngelo.
We want the order to be:
Marilee Seymour, Maryanne DeAngelo and then the rest of the results.
What is the link to your site? hidden link
I tried creating a new field 'order-field' and then ordering by order-field and then post date. This worked on the top results but the remaining testimonials were not present in the results.
You either need two separate queries (one to show the priority results, a second to show the rest), or to use a custom ordering field as you outline in your question.
I suspect the problem with your implementation is a quirk of WordPress query ordering: if ordering by some field, any results that don't have a value for that field are omitted.
I guess you have given values to the priority results, and the rest don't have a value.
You need all posts to have a default value (e.g. 10), and then you can set the field value on the priority posts to, say, 1 and 2.
Thank you for your reply. After I sent the request I was thinking the same thing. I created a new ordering field 'order-success' and set the default to 10. I think updated the 'Marilee' and 'Maryanne' testimonials to have ordering 1 and 2 respectively. So, all fields have a default value of 10 and then a few are set to 1 or 2.
However, when I make these changes only 'marilee' and 'maryanne' show up in the results.
page: hidden link
If you want to see how it looks before the ordering column you can look at production: hidden link
We want it to list: Marilee, Maryanne and then the rest by post date (desc).
I am uploading an image with my toolset parameters.
When ordering the view by a certain custom field (as in this case it's 'order-success'), it is important that all the posts have some value stored for that custom field. Any post where this custom field has no value will be ignored by the view.
It seems that the custom field value for this field is set for the 'Marilee' and 'Maryanne' posts, as you've specifically updated them, but not for the other existing fields. If you'll update/save those existing posts once, the default custom field value will be saved with them and they'll also start showing in the view's results.
For any future posts that you'll create, the default custom field value will be automatically saved.