Allow manual ordering of Links, Link Categories and Post Categories

[froman118]

My "My Link Order" and "My Category Order" plugins allow users the ability to set explicit orders for their links and categories, something that is already possible with Pages. Ordering by name or ID or other methods don't cut it for a lot of people and they want to be able to set an order and have it show up that way in their sidebar.

In WP 1.5 and 2.1 it was necessary to modify core files to enable this behavior through plugins. WP 2.2 eliminated the need for modifying core files because an arbitrary order string could be passed to the template functions and it would be concatenated with "link_" or "cat_". With the introduction of WP 2.3 and terms, you can no longer pass a string in when trying to order Categories, you are restricted to ordering by name, ID, and count (link function still allows this behavior though).

So instead of fighting against the system and forcing the many people that use my plugin to resort to overwriting core files I'd like to see about adding this functionality to Wordpress. The following changes/additions would be necessary for this:

-Add columns or table to keep track of orders
-Add interface to allow user to set order of links
-Modify template functions to accommodate manual ordering method
-Modify built in widgets to let users select manual order

An interface to support the ordering is being developed for Pages in Ticket #2702.

Could also just change the behavior of get_terms() to allow arbitrary order strings like get_bookmarks().

[ffemtcj]

No Patch. Moved to 2.7

[Denis-de-Bernardy]

get_terms() was changed a few revs back to allow precisely that.