Sorting topics

I need to display topic list (parents and childrens) using relevant (importance) order. Correct me if I am wrong, but Foswiki by default always sort topics alphabetically regardless if I use Search marcro, Tree or other plugin.

How can I change this behaviour, so that I will be able to generate list in any order? I thought about using DataForms - add order field to each topic. However I'm not sure if this is the best/suggested way of influencing order?

-- MateuszKDzior - 16 Oct 2015

The "order" parameter in SEARCH macro does provide for ordering search results in other ways. If the order you want is arbitrary (i.e. not one of the default order options) then you're correct that you could use a custom form field and use the formfield(name) option for the order parameter.

One additional option is to look at DBCachePlugin which provides the DBQUERY macro that serves similar purpose to the SEARCH macro but also allow sorting by multiple attributes.

-- LynnwoodBrown - 28 Oct 2015