Earnie, There is clearly a need for alternative ways of ordering nodes. The weight module does exactly what FGM said earlier in this thread. One of its limitations is that the granularity is still too coarse -- -100 for non-sticky, and 1 to 100, or something like that for sticky. Nodeorder only works within individual taxonomy categories. It adds a 'weight_in_tid' field to the term_node table. It has infinite granularity as far as ordering goes, but it is not universal across all nodes. The way it works is that it initializes weight_in_tid to the node's nid, and then, when nodes are ordered within a tid, their weight_in_tids are swapped or moved around. Whether or not this needs to be a core feature is probably up for debate. It seems that you could create a small contrib module that tacks on another weight field to each node, and then you could somehow use Views to make sure that your new weight is used all or most of the time..??.. Marc Jakob Petsovits wrote:
On Thursday, 15. March 2007, Earnie Boyd wrote:
Currently there is no method other than modifying the publishing date to order a node. This becomes important mainly with the Top Sticky flag where the node is meant to provide first experience data. I would like to consider adding to the Publishing Options a Node Weight to add to the sorting criteria for the node display.
Note that there are already two contrib modules that serve a similar purpose: - Weight (http://drupal.org/project/weight), and - nodeorder (http://drupal.org/project/nodeorder)
If you want to get this into Drupal core, you might fetch some ideas from those.