Shakewell Post Order

Made by Shakewell. Free and open source, built and maintained by the Shakewell team.

Drag-and-drop ordering of posts, pages and custom post types on the admin list, saved to WordPress's built-in menu_order field. It replaces the Post Types Order plugin with a much smaller one.

Use

1. Activate the plugin and open Settings > Post order.
2. Tick the post types you want to order. None are enabled by default.
3. On each type's list screen, drag rows into place, or use the Move up and Move down buttons in the Order column. A status message announces each save to screen readers.

Hierarchical types (with page-attributes) work too: an item moves only among items with the same parent, children travel with it, and the order is renumbered within that parent only. If a parent's children are split across pages of the list, those items are locked with a notice until you show more items per page.

Enabled flat lists sort by menu_order, then title, until you pick another column to sort by. Only the current page is reordered and positions continue from the previous page. The front end is untouched: read the order yourself with orderby => menu_order.

Set the post types from code instead with the filter, which receives the saved list:

add_filter( 'shakewell_post_order_post_types', fn() => array( 'page', 'book' ) );

Saving checks a nonce, that the post type is enabled, and edit_post for every post sent. Uninstalling removes only the plugin's option, never a menu_order value.

Work on it

composer install
npm ci
npm run env:start      # needs Docker
npm test               # PHPUnit inside the WordPress test container
composer lint          # WordPress coding standards
npm run plugin-check   # the official Plugin Check

Release

Bump the version in the plugin header, readme.txt (Stable tag) and the VERSION constant, add a changelog line, then tag vX.Y.Z. The release workflow checks the three match and attaches shakewell-post-order.zip to a GitHub release.

Install with Composer

Until a plugin is listed, install the zip from its GitHub release, pinned to a version with a checksum:

"repositories": [
  {
    "type": "package",
    "package": {
      "name": "shakewellagency/shakewell-post-order",
      "version": "0.1.0",
      "type": "wordpress-plugin",
      "dist": {
        "url": "https://github.com/shakewellagency/shakewell-post-order/releases/download/v0.1.0/shakewell-post-order.zip",
        "type": "zip",
        "shasum": "<sha1 of the zip>"
      },
      "require": { "php": ">=8.1", "composer/installers": "^2.3" }
    }
  }
],
"require": { "shakewellagency/shakewell-post-order": "0.1.0" }

Get the checksum with shasum -a 1 shakewell-post-order.zip.

Use the zip, not a vcs repository. A source install puts tests and repository files under the web root, while the zip leaves them out. The build needs no GitHub token and makes no GitHub API calls. Copy the plugin's PHP requirement into require, because Composer doesn't read the plugin's own composer.json here.

A plugin with runtime Composer libraries must ship vendor/ in its zip. The template's release workflow uses git archive, which leaves vendor/ out, so add composer install --no-dev and build the zip from .distignore, as shakewell-saml-sso does.

Once a plugin is listed, switch to wpackagist-plugin/shakewell-post-order and drop this entry.

Made by Shakewell

This plugin is part of a family of free WordPress plugins from Shakewell. Each one does one job, keeps its dependencies small and is released under GPL-2.0-or-later.

Use it, fork it and send fixes. To have it set up on your site, or to have a plugin built, talk to Shakewell.

See them all: Shakewell plugins on GitHub.