If you’re looking for new and interesting ways to display content on your website, then the Sortable plugin which is one of the best WordPress grid plugins that can help. Once you’ve installed the plugin on your website, you’ll have the ability to create custom grid layouts that are populated with your choice of content. These grid layouts can then be displayed on your website, giving your visitors another way to interact with your content.
Sortable is a WordPress plugin that sorts your posts using different parameters like social status, alphabetically, comments and others. In terms of social status, you can use Sortable plugin to sort your posts according to their social popularity like Facebook or Twitter Shares, as well as 4 other social networks. You can easily integrate this plugin into your website with the Shortcode Generator or setting up a Sortable page. You can select post type like posts, products, portfolio or any other registered post type. The plugin comes with a slick ajax loading animation and pagination, and you can control how many posts are shown per page. The Sortable plugin makes us of 2 different views, list and images. Each of these views displays posts according to your needs.
One of the main features in the Sortable plugin is the Sort by dropdown feature. This feature gives you a number of options on how to sort your posts or other post types. You can order posts by the number of social shares (Social Status), alphabetically, by date and number of comments.
Sorting your posts and web pages allows the visitors to see your posts in a clean flat design with two viewing options – list and images. The Shortcode Generator is available for creating the loop that you need. Caching can speed up the loading of posts since getting the information from different social networks can take some time.
To get started with the Sortable plugin, download and install it from wpicode.com. On the wordpress dashboard, you should see an added Sortable menu item.
Click on this Sortable menu to open the admin page. You will see three tabs, the Shortcode Generator, My Sortable Pages and the Settings tab.
The Shortcode generator
The first tab that opens up is the Shortcode Generator. You can use this tab to generate a shortcode which you will embed in your posts and webpages. The shortcode looks something similar to this:
<?php do_shortcode(“
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In the Shortcode Generator you can select a number of options with which you would like to sort your posts.
Social Status – Show sort by social status as an option for sorting posts. This options is
selected by default so if you don’t select Hide, the Social Status will automatically appear as a Sort by option.
Show Alphabetically – Show sort by alphabetical order as an option for sorting posts. It will show both A-Z and Z-A options.7
Show Most Commented – Show sort by most commented posts as an option for sorting posts.
Hide Social Statistics – Hide statistics in the loop of posts. Statistics are displayed below the post content when enabled.
Default View – Default view option selected when the page is loaded.
Posts Per Page – Number of posts that will be displayed per page and according to which the pagination is built.
Color – Hex color as the theme color of the style of different elements. Default is #777.
Post Type – Post type like “posts” or “portfolio”.
Social Media Sortby Options – Which social networks you would like to be included in your loop? Select the social media you would like to be displayed under “social status” in the Sort by dropdown.
Social Status Calculation – Select the social media you want to include in the “social status” calculation. Each share counts as 1 in the total calculation (for example 5 facebook shares of one post will count as more than 4 twitter shares of another post).
Custom – the custom dropdown helps you select whether you want to show or hide the custom sort option set in Settings. When you are done setting up everything, you should see a shortcode generated at the bottom of the page. Copy it and embed it in any of your posts or webpages.
My Sortable Pages
This tab has a similar functionality to the Shortcode tab in that it allows you to select your options. However, any settings done here will be automatically re-written on your website and your page will display the Sortable loop. To get started, you first need to select the page you want to have the loop displayed, then press Set. This action will create the template with its default settings as described in Shortcodes. If you wish you can change more options in Advanced option panel. Just select the options you need there and press Set. After you setup your page, you can remove the Sortable loop by pressing Unset.
Settings
The settings tab shows you some settings that change the way your loop is displayed.
Disable Font Awesome – If font-awesome script is already included by another plugin or
theme you can disable it here. It’s not recommended that you do this unless you see some problems with the icons
Caching – Cache statistics from social media, improves loading times. Set 0 to disable
Custom Sort Option – With this option you can set your own sort filter like price or quantity which can be very helpful if you are using other plugins with their own meta keys.
Custom Meta Key – Custom meta key can be anything that your plugins or theme is using like “price” or “size”.
Ascending/Descending Order – For example if price key is ascending it will show the lowest prices first.
Sort Name (Text) – Sort text can be anything like “Price (low to high)”.
Pre Meta Text – Will be displayed before the meta key, for example $.
Labels & Translations – All labels can be translated to your own language or you can enter some other label instead.
