Drag/Drop category sort-order assignment

[orenyk]

2016-02-17

Manually updating the sort order for a number of categories is painful at best, we should make this drag/drop (similar to #250).

Original

Reported by Art:

I've been cleaning up our reservations site so students can more easily navigate it. One issue I'm having is getting certain equipment models to appear with the rest of their categories on the same page. For example I have a category called "Cables". Every model I have tagged as Cable appears on the first page of our site except one VGA cable which stubbornly stays on the second page. This is confusing for the students because they don't think to keep looking for other types of cables. How can I change this?

It gets weirder - when I'm set to view 50 items per page, 8 of the 9 cables appear on the first page, but when I'm set to view 30 items per page only 7 of them do. Similarly, the next category down has 8/8 on page 1 for 50 items/page, but only 5/8 for 30 items/page. Even stranger, the categories don't obey the sort order on the second page, i.e. missing models from the top category on page 1 are not at the top of page 2.

This is pretty critical, and somewhat complex - I couldn't figure out the issue by scanning through the relevant code (prepare_catalog_index_vars, relevant views). This is top priority for the next release.

[orenyk]

Never mind, all of the categories had a sort order set to zero so I'm guessing there were some issues with the sorting in the query. I manually went in and assigned sort orders, and it was pretty painful... I'm going to repurpose this issue for making sort order assignment drag-and-drop (similar to #250), although it will probably wait for the hypothetical JS rewrite.