By ecksley on

In Views 1 is there a way for nodes to be sorted alphabetically by title without including words like "The" at the beginning?

I considered Views Custom field and was able to create a field that stripped off preceding "The"s where they occurred. However, the Views Custom field value does not appear to be an option within sort criteria.

Thank you for your thoughts!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

B747’s picture

B747 commented

http://drupal.org/project/views_natural_sort could well be what you're looking for.

ecksley’s picture

ecksley commented

Thank you B747!

I'm maintaining a site in D5 so that won't work, but it's great to know for all the new sites I build.

Here is what I ended up doing it for those that care:

  • Changed the node titles in question from "The Cat" to "Cat, The"
  • This allows the standard title sort to work without the "The"
  • Create the following reprocess function in template.tpl.php to reassemble titles correctly:
    <?php
function shopZen_preprocess(&$vars, $hook) {
  $vars['sample_variable'] = t('Lorem ipsum.');
  $title = $vars[title];
  if (substr($title, -5)==", The"){
  	$vars['title'] = "The ".substr($title, 0, -5);
  } else if (substr($title, -3)==", A") {
  	$vars['title'] = "A ".substr($title, 0, -3);
  } else
  	$vars['title'] = $title;
  }
}
?>
  • Install Views Custom Field.
  • Replace the page title field wherever it appears in Views with a Views Custom Field with similar code to what you see above where possible.

What a pain. Thanks again for the response!