Essential WordPress Plugins: Simple Page Ordering

The Simple Page Ordering plugin brings some incredibly useful functionality which I believe should be built into the core of WordPress. When building a theme you have the ability to control content exactly as you wish and output it just the way you want it. However for the end user, editing the site, and in particular ordering/re-ordering, posts can be a bit of a pain.

By default, the way users can order content is via the page attributes value; this requires the front end user, who’ll be updating the site to manually, input a numeric value for each post and then it’s output based on these values.

Now even though this method works it’s not practical for anyone using this method for any more than a handful of posts. The addition of posts and placing them into an existing order would mean updating each of the existing posts attributes to reflect the addition of this new post which just isn’t practical.

The use of this plugin changes this completely and makes the process a whole lot easier. Rather than even acknowledging the attribute value, the plugin allows users to simply drag and drop posts into the order they wish them to sit (which is done within the posts overview window).

An example of where this was particularly useful for myself was on a team members directory, when a new team member was added and they needed to sit in a particular order. Rather than editing several dozen other posts to accommodate this addition I was able to drag and drop this new post to the desired position.

Are there any other handy plugins you know of that make simple tasks such as this easier? Or perhaps you’ve come across something using WordPress that could be made more simple? Let us know & we’ll give them a whirl 🙂