Configurable default sort order in the Explorer?

Considering that the Explorer represents the contents and layout of the main site menu, the fact that the default sort order is locked as -latest_revision_created_at is frustrating. It means that you require an extra step (clicking “Enable ordering of child pages”) to see the Menu layout. This is not good UX for site editors who aren’t intimately familiar with Wagtail’s admin UI.

I’d be happy to implement this myself, but I don’t really see anywhere in the admin UI where one can set “site configuration”. Though I suppose it could be useful to have a default that’s tied to a user’s role (users who don’t have permission to edit the menu don’t need this sort order by default), so it could go in the Group editor.

[gasman]

I’m in favour of having the parent page’s model specify the ordering, and in fact I’d take it one step further: specifying an order should override the manual (menu) ordering. In other words, it’s not just an admin display preference: it governs the actual ordering of pages within the database (as defined by Treebeard’s path field), and newly created (or renamed) pages would be inserted at their appropriate position.

I believe this would negate the need for a user preference: the explorer would default to showing each page listing in that section’s ‘native’ ordering, whether that’s title order, date order, or manually defined. The problem we’ve faced up to now is that the manual sortorder naturally degenerates into randomness unless there’s someone actively managing it - which won’t be the case for a large news / blog / people listing - and so it’s unusable as a default ordering in the explorer, leading us to adopt title or date as the ‘next best’ option. (In turn, this leads to the confusion where people set a manual page ordering and think their changes have been lost as soon as they return to the ‘regular’ explorer view.) By making it possible to tie the menu order to title or date, this change would make the menu ordering relevant and usable again.

[stepiiicz]

Wouldn’t it be better to have a possibility to set the default sorting in the page model class, e.g. something like the following?

class PeopleSection(Page):
    ...
    class Meta:
        verbose_name = u"Staff"
        children_ordering = "title"
    ...

Nowadays I run several wagtail sites that have different sections for which I would prefer different sorting settings. E.g. in sections with articles you usually want to sort by -last_created_at, but for sections like staff you’d prefer sorting by title etc.