WDD Drag & Drop Post Order

Introduction

What this plugin does

WDD Drag & Drop Post Order gives you a dedicated admin screen to drag posts into whatever order you want. Once you save, your site's front end will show posts in that exact order — no theme editing, no custom queries, no shortcodes.

It works by setting WordPress's built-in menu_order field on each post, then hooking into pre_get_posts to apply that order on the front end for any post type you've enabled.

Key features

• Drag-and-drop reordering using jQuery UI Sortable
• Works with Posts, Pages, and any registered Custom Post Type
• Optional date update — automatically adjusts post dates to match the visual order
• Three date-spacing options: per hour, per day, or per week
• Live search with debounce and pagination for large libraries
• One-click reset to restore default WordPress ordering
• No configuration needed on the front end — ordering applies automatically

Before You Start

Requirements

Setup

Installation

Upload via WordPress admin (recommended)

1. 1
   Go to Plugins → Add New

   In your WordPress dashboard navigate to Plugins → Add New Plugin.
2. 2
   Click "Upload Plugin"

   Hit the Upload Plugin button at the top, then choose the wdd-drag-drop-post-order.zip file.
3. 3
   Install & Activate

   Click Install Now, then Activate Plugin once it uploads.
4. 4
   Configure Settings

   Go to Post Order → Settings to choose which post types to enable.

Manual installation (FTP)

1. 1
   Extract the zip

   Unzip wdd-drag-drop-post-order.zip on your local machine.
2. 2
   Upload via FTP

   Upload the wdd-drag-drop-post-order/ folder to /wp-content/plugins/ on your server.
3. 3
   Activate in WordPress

   Go to Plugins → Installed Plugins and click Activate.

Usage

The Reorder screen

This is your main working area — go to Post Order → Reorder to open it.

Post type tabs

If you've enabled more than one post type in Settings, you'll see a tab row at the top. Click a tab to switch between post types. Each has its own completely separate order.

Dragging posts

Each post row has a drag handle on the left (the dotted grid icon). Grab it and drag the row up or down. A blue placeholder shows where the post will land. You can re-drag as many times as you like before saving.

Search

Use the search box in the top-right to filter posts by title. Results update automatically after a short delay and pagination resets to page 1 on each search.

Saving

Once you're happy with the order, click Save Order. The button stays disabled until you make at least one drag. After saving the order is immediately applied on the front end.

Reset

The Reset button clears the custom menu_order for all posts of the current type, setting them back to 0. WordPress then falls back to its default sort (usually date descending). A confirmation dialog appears before anything changes.

Feature

The date update feature

When you toggle Update dates on the Reorder screen and save, the plugin rewrites the post_date of every post in the list to reflect the new order. This is useful when your theme or RSS feed displays dates and you want chronology to match visual order.

How the dates are calculated

The plugin uses the current time as a base and works backwards down the list:

• First post in the list → gets right now as its date
• Second post → gets now minus 1 interval
• Third post → gets now minus 2 intervals
• …and so on

The interval (hour, day, or week) is set under Settings → Date spacing. With "1 Day" spacing and 5 posts you'd get today, yesterday, the day before, and so on.

Reference

Settings reference

All settings live at Post Order → Settings and are stored in the wdd_ddpo_settings WordPress option as a serialised array.

Reading settings programmatically

// Get all settings
$settings = get_option( 'wdd_ddpo_settings', [] );

// Or use the Settings class directly
$obj          = WDD_DDPO_Settings::get_instance();
$post_types   = $obj->get( 'post_types' );
$update_dates = $obj->get( 'update_dates' );
$spacing      = $obj->get( 'date_spacing' );

Developer

File structure

One class per file, all loaded from the main plugin entry point. No autoloader — simple and dependency-free.

Class responsibilities

Developer

Hooks & Filters

Use these hooks to customise the plugin's behaviour without editing its files. Add all custom code to your theme's functions.php or a site-specific plugin.

add_filter( 'wdd_ddpo_enabled_post_types', function( $post_types ) {
    $post_types[] = 'portfolio';
    return $post_types;
} );

add_filter( 'wdd_ddpo_posts_per_page', function( $per_page ) {
    return 100;
} );

add_action( 'wdd_ddpo_after_save_order', function( $post_ids, $post_type ) {
    // Example: clear a custom cache after reordering
    my_plugin_clear_cache( $post_type );
}, 10, 2 );

add_filter( 'wdd_ddpo_query_args', function( $args, $post_type ) {
    if ( $post_type === 'product' ) {
        $args['post_status'] = 'publish';
    }
    return $args;
}, 10, 2 );

Reference

Frequently asked questions

History

Changelog