How to Display WordPress Posts in Alphabetical Order

By default, WordPress displays all posts chronologically by date published. That’s great for journal writing, news blogging, and general blog chatter, but when you want to re purpose your WordPress posts for use in a WordPress website, it often comes in handy to be able to display your WordPress Posts in alphabetical order. Enter the WP-SNAP! plugin by Nathan Olsen.

WP-SNAP is an acronym for: WordPress System for Navigating Alphabetized Posts…and it does a bang up job of it! The WP-SNAP! plugin is a great solution for sites that want to have analphabetical Glossary, Directory, Index, or Reviews repository. [If alphabetical post order isn’t what you are after, check out a great plugin for creating a custom order for your WordPress posts.]

WP-SNAP! integrates with both custom permalinks and the WordPress loop. Plugin options can be managed site-wide or on the template itself, with results either restricted to one category or broadened to include child categories as well. Options have also been added to allow the customization of css class names and the appearance of html mark-up. You will need to do some code level integration to make this plugin do exactly what you want it to, but it’s not overly complex and there are good directions on the plugin developer’s website (as well as a tutorial coming soon here at WordPressZen).

Have you used WP-SNAP! to order your posts alphabetically on your site? If so, tell us about your experience in the comments below!

Below is a screenshot of a WordPress powered Alphabetical Glossary of Terms created with the help of the WP-SNAP! plugin:

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Customizing the Order of your WordPress Posts

A common request by webmasters when using WordPress as a CMS is to be able to change the post order on their category and/or tag pages. Without the help of a plugin, you can do this manually by changing the post dates of each post to reflect a custom display order instead of the order they were actually created. But editing post dates is inefficient, and would have to be updated and adjusted every time you add a new post. No thanks!

Once again, a member of the WordPress open source community delivers a solution with theAStickyPostOrderER Plugin by AndreSC. This plugin provides a nifty interface that allows you to change post order for your WordPress posts within each category and tag to an assigned custom order. And if you don’t feel like applying an order number to every post, you can just assign “sticky” posts, which always display at the top of the page and/or “droppy” posts, which always display at the end of a batch of posts on a page.

[This plugin allows you to specify a custom order for your WordPress posts. If you are wanting to display WordPress posts alphabetically, there are different plugin solutions that.]

Users of this plugin, please feel free to post on your experiences with the AStickyPostOrderER plugin in the comments below!

Screen shot of the AStickyPostOrderER Plugin Admin Interface:

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