[TYPO3-ttnews] Ext: News - manual sorting of news records in FE

[Philipp Schiffmann]

Hi Georg,

> this is all done in the core and IMO fixing that would not be very easy.

I spent the last two days on an attempt to fix it. I proceeded as follows:
I added an action to the backend module in which you can choose from all 
plugins with list_type == 'news_pi1'. When you select a plugin, my 
action builds a demand object from its flexform settings. If "manual 
sorting" is selected as the sorting mechanism, the repository will join 
the news table with the table "tx_news_plugin_news_mm" and query the 
news ordered by the second tables property foreign_sorting instead. In 
that table you could now store an independent manual ordering for each 
plugin. You could change that ordering in the modules action just like 
you would do in the list module for data stored in a normal sysfolder.
Unfortunately Extbase has a bug that you can not use a "join" and a 
"contains" statement in the same query. So PHP dies when it not only has 
to show a list of news but build complete news objects.
However I thought it would have been a great feature for our authors 
because they had have gotten a better overview over the news that really 
appeared on their sites (we'll be working a lot with news in different 
categories and different folders...). And manual sorting might have 
hushed their requests for more complicated sorting mechanisms as well. 
So I thought I'd share my thoughts about it with you though it didn't work.
Anyway if there is still interest (now that I hopefully explained my 
intention understandable) I'd be happy to get feedback!

At last I want to pay the developers of news great compliment - it's 
been a pleasure to work with your extension! I'll lend some of your 
ideas for further projects, that is for sure ;-)

Philipp