Meta_key sort for numeric values / Natural Sort Order

[stencil]

When trying to sort posts by meta_key with numeric values the order is not "natural".

eg: 1, 10, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

This should be

eg: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

I have attached a simple addition to wp-includes/query.php which allows for this type of sorting.

Query use: orderby=meta_value_num

Addition of meta_value_num

Any chance of pushing this fix please? It keeps annoying me each time I upgrade WP.

or is there a blocking issue?

Moving to 3.0, as 2.9 is not for new enhancements/feature requests.

Perhaps another dev who's more database savy than I can comment on any particular issues which this might cause? Whilst i see none, Would be handy to know that for sure.

I think this is really a bug, simply because sorting posts via a numerical meta_key fails to work when values are > 9.

The addition of meta_value_num would be a new feature, yes, but not really required just to fix this bug (which is in the DB query).

Patch looks good.

check allowed_keys earlier, remove unnecessary comments

remove_redundant check, use foreach instead of for

Since we're here, I've made some straightforward cleanups in query.php.3.diff

(In [13501]) Add meta_value_num meta_key ordering for WP_Query. Allows Natural numeric ordering of results. Props stencil & scribu for cleanups. Fixes #10649

Nice to see the commit, cheers