When you have several content objects in content containers (such as articles in folders), you may want to sort the display of the content in a certain order.

There are many different ways to sort. This section shows one method, which can be applied to the most common sort preferences (like manually, alphabetically, and by date).

First, log in to the Administration Interface. Click on the Content structure tab, in the horizontal menu bar.

Content Structure Tab

On the left side of the page, the site content will be displayed in a hierarchical tree structure.

Content Structure Left Menu

Locate the content container whose content you want to sort. The screenshot on the left has focus on the folder Home (called the “root node”), because it is located on the top of the content structure.

All content containers directly under the root node will appear on the global menu, and this is often the first thing editors want to sort so that they are displayed in a certain sequence. We will use the global menu as a example for sorting content.

The content containers below the root node in the screenshot to the left make up the site's horizontal menu (in the front end). We will now change the order in which they are displayed on the site.

Click on the root node to display the content listed as shown in the screenshot below.

The sorting type has been set to Priority and Ascending. This allows us to do manual sorting.

Sorting Content

The priority is determined by the value in the Priority column. The content with the lowest number will be listed first on the global menu.

Front End Horizontal Menu

The best practice with this method of sorting is to have several numbers between each priority. (We have used a buffer of 10 in this example). If there is no buffer, you would have to change all the priorities of the other content objects if you wanted to add another object in the middle.

We can organize the menus (select which one comes in which order) by simply changing their priority number.