ability to order by specific field

it would be really nice to be able to order flexinode nodes by a specific field.

my current situation is that i have created a "workshop" content type that have, among other fields, a date field for the workshop to happen on. i would like to order the list of that content type by that date field so that they show up in chronological order.

i am envisioning either a setting in the creation of the content type that says how to order the nodes of that type or possibly some way to do it with the url or even tablesort. the tabular view does not really acheive the kind of display that i want, but behaves nicely for sorting...

i have tried to hack in "ORDER BY flexinode-6.numeric_data DESC", but haven't gotten it to work...