Custom Ordering of WordPress posts.

I seem to be becoming the go-to guy for WordPress in my circle of friends. I don't mind—I've grown fond of pulling apart other people's code, and the monster that WordPress is always makes that interesting.

Last night, I was asked if I know how to order posts differently in The Loop. I don't trust The Loop. I much prefer to use WP_Query, as I feel more in control, but my friend had already written a lot of functions that seemed to depend on using The Loop, and I've never been one for rocking the boat where live code is concerned!  So, my buddy has the current code and it's not working:

queryposts($querystring . '&order=asc&orderby=title');

The more perceptive will spot that he's trying to order his posts by title, rather than by date, but no matter how you order/rename the variables, the results come back the same. A few minutes hunting later leads me to a query string variable called suppressfilters, which is called at the last minute in the query build, which applies things like ordering for stickies. Obviously, if you're running a custom query, chances are you don't care about stickies, so simply set suppressfilters to true when calling query_posts() :

queryposts($querystring . '&order=asc&orderby=title&suppress_filters=true');

and the posts in your loop will be ordered the way you told them to be ordered. I'm pretty sure that there's a point for this in the grand scheme of things, but I'm damned if I can see it.