WP_Query Order by Taxonomy

[justindgivens]

To be able to order by a taxonomy for any post type.

Added:

'orderby' => 'tax'
'tax_name' => 'taxonomy_name'

This way you can sort the post by the Term->name (ASC/DESC) value.

It was something needed in one of my projects and thought the WP community might like it.

[scribu]

Thanks for the patch, but this is not something we want in Core. Here's a thorough explanation from Otto:

​http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/14306/using-wp-query-is-it-possible-to-orderby-taxonomy/14309#14309

[justindgivens]

Scribu, thanks for the quick turn. Also thanks for those articles.

[marsjaninzmarsa]

Otto had a point, but had it 4 years ago - now we have sticky posts and other custom implementations of the same concept for CPT based on taxes, what with it?

If I wanna show my "Promoted" posts on the top I must create two separate WP_Querys, or manually play with SQL via hooks, or rearrange posts array after query (last one only if I can bear sticking on each page separately, what's not right solution in some cases).

[sc0ttkclark]

I'd be totally +1 for this, but I just can't because it still requires three joins (wp_term_relationships for terms related to the posts, wp_term_taxonomy to restrict by taxonomy, wp_terms to get the term name).

However, there are solutions in the form of snippets and maybe even plugins -- that can add this functionality. So I'd say, for performance reasons, this should be closed. Three joins is an awful lot on a very large database of posts with heavy use of terms.

[boonebgorges]

As @sc0ttkclark notes, there are performance concerns with this suggestion.

Performance aside, it's not clear how the feature would be implemented in a consistent way. A post object may be associated with more than one term in a taxonomy. When that's the case, how does the sorting work?

Closing, pending someone who wants to do the dirty work to demonstrate how the feature would work in practice.