When building a custom backend, quite often a client will ask for the ablilty to order records/posts/images…
Here’s a tried and tested method i use to build this functionality. It will work with or without js. In this example we will order the traditional post records.
Create a table to hold your posts and include a column (int) called order.
Each time a new post is saved, the order column is assigned the auto inc value of the rows id. This prevents records from ever having the same order value.
To provide the user with a way to order posts records, i’ll start with the HTML. This process is designed to degrade gracefully when JS is disabled. Dont worry if this process seems a bit clunky to the user, chances are they’ll have js turned on. I have found by restricting yourself to develop for HTML first created better structured and semantic code. Quite often divining straight in there with the javascript will get the job done, but it’ll be a headache to maintain. Read the rest of this entry »