Sticky Post Order

Turn sticky posts into ordered queues: sticky decides which posts are included, this plugin decides their order — independent of publish dates.

Description

WordPress core exposes sticky as a boolean. A post is either stickied or not, and the order among stickied posts still comes from the publish date. Promoting an older post therefore means backdating it, which also changes the date shown on the article, its position in archives, and the related-posts list.

This plugin splits membership from order. Membership still uses the native sticky checkbox in the post editor; order lives in a separate option and is edited by dragging rows on the admin page under Posts. Publish dates are never touched.

What it actually does:

• Groups queues by any taxonomy, one independent queue per group. With no groups configured, all stickied posts share a single queue.
• Exposes two read-only REST fields, sticky_order_rank and sticky_order_group, so a headless front end gets the order with the post list — no extra request, no slug join.
• Appends newly stickied posts to the tail in reverse-date order; they never jump ahead.
• Drops posts automatically when they are unstickied or unpublished. No stale IDs to clean.
• Lists stickied posts that match no group at the bottom of the admin page, so a post never silently disappears.
• Disabling the plugin simply removes the REST fields; consumers fall back to date order.

The plugin contains no site-specific term names, post types, or copy. Groups, labels, capability, menu location, option name, and post types are all injected through filters, so the directory can be copied to any other site as is. Default admin UI labels are Chinese; replace them wholesale with sticky_order_labels on English installations.

Installation

1. Put the sticky-order directory into wp-content/plugins/.
2. Activate "Sticky Post Order" on the Plugins screen.
3. Declare groups with sticky_order_groups, or leave it empty for single-queue mode.
4. Consume sticky_order_rank in the front end and rebuild static output after reordering.

Hooks

sticky_order_groups (array) Group map array( slug => label ); slugs match term slugs. Empty = single-queue mode.

sticky_order_group_taxonomy (string) Taxonomy used for grouping. Default category.

sticky_order_post_types (array) Post types included. Default array( 'post' ).

sticky_order_option_name (string) Option holding the queues. Default sticky_order_queues.

sticky_order_capability (string) Capability required for the admin page. Default edit_others_posts.

sticky_order_menu_parent (string) Parent admin menu. Default edit.php.

sticky_order_labels (array) Admin UI copy. Missing keys fall back to defaults.

REST

Two read-only fields are added to the post response:

sticky_order_rank (integer|null) Position in its queue, 0-based. null when the post is not queued. In grouped mode this is the position within that group; it is not comparable across groups.

sticky_order_group (string|null) Key of the owning queue; default in single-queue mode.

Posts that are not stickied return null for both fields, which tells the front end to fall back to date order.

Storage

Option sticky_order_queues, for example:

array(
    'section-a' => array( 28 ),        // array order = queue order
    'section-b' => array( 60, 61 ),
)

Only IDs that are currently stickied and published are used; everything else is filtered out at read time.