Blog posts page: custom sorting logic

🚀 Feature

Let’s be less opinionated and let users decide on the sorting logic.

Have you read the Contributing Guidelines on issues?

Yes

Has this been requested on Canny?

Requested on Discord

Motivation

Sorting by descending time works in almost all cases, but we shouldn’t assume that all users use the blog for time-based information. E.g., sort by alphabetical order? Sort by tags?

API Design

A new comparePosts plugin option, which accepts a function that is passed to the sorting algorithm:

https://github.com/facebook/docusaurus/blob/b40e45943ec1a8d52d0f524983d38d9ba23ec6bc/packages/docusaurus-plugin-content-blog/src/blogUtils.ts#L345-L347

And yes, it will receive the entire blog post, with all of its metadata and content.

Have you tried building it?

No; should be trivial

[slorber]

@factoidforrest

Well, we sometimes produce multiple blog posts per day, and it would be nice to individually control their position.

In this case, you can use the date frontmatter to specify a time: date: 2021-12-20T10:00:00Z

Or sometimes we have something REALLY important and we want to stick it to the top. We recently did the blog post about log4shell which is why this is coming up. lunasec.io/docs/blog/log4j-zero-day

Would you use position: 3 for such a post?

IMHO what we are looking for here is rather a way to “pin” a blog post at the top (similar to GitHub issues somehow).

It’s also a common pattern among bloggers to have featured posts, and drive more attention to specific articles:

• https://leerob.io/
• https://www.joshwcomeau.com/
• https://blog.maximeheckel.com/

We could allow a plugin option to feature a list of posts, put them at the top, and maybe also add them to the blog sidebar to make them accessible from all blog pages.

Using featured: true frontmatter can also be nice, but not sure how to ensure an order in this case though

---

Using something like position: number is quite ambiguous, particularly when not all items have an explicit position, and we can’t prevent users to use the same position twice. + when adding a new blog post, do you really want to edit and offset all previously defined positions 😅

If this position is only applied inside a single day, it would be a quite unintuitive option, and using an hour in frontmatter can be enough.

[cerkiewny]

I don’t think it is quite as easy to add as another plugin, you have the contextual “next” and “previous” generation for the blog posts, which would be really awkward if they were sorted differently to the plugin sorting. I don’t have strong feelings about this feature, and I would personally add something looking more like enum:

{
  blogSorting: chronologicalDesc // also would have few more options like chronologicalAsc, maybe alphabeticalDesc/alphabeticalAsc
}

My feeling is that the only strong use case here is reversing the order from oldest to newest