Quote:
Originally Posted by MickiTee
An alternative way would be to remove all the spaces in the tags before sorting. It also means that users who have templates etc which parse the tag using a period wouldn't have to update their code. |
This doesn't work. There are characters such as plus and parentheses that sort before period. The suggested change ensures that periods become something that sorts before all other printable characters.
Quote:
If the field is a custom column a "tag sort" field could be added to the table which could act in the same way as the 'author sort' and 'title sort' fields. In addition it should be possible to add a tweak which would allow users to decide how they want their tags to sort - existing or new.
Hopefully this should avoid all those bug reports for something that isn't a bug.
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Adding a "sort" would indeed permit people to do what they wanted with order but I think it is impractical. Tags and tags-like items come and go frequently, so maintaining the sort would be time consuming. It is also a database-incompatible change, which would break any plugin or app that thinks it knows the database schema.
The change I made is similar to the one suggested -- ensure that X.Y sorts below Xanything.Y. There was no need to change the value of the tag other than when computing the "sort key", and this only when the column is hierarchical. Templates etc don't need to be updated unless they depend on order, which isn't easy to do.