This tutorial provides advice for sorting posts when telling a story in WordPress. The default display of posts in WordPress is chronological with the most recent being first at the top of the page. For storytelling you may want your posts to display in a more logical order for the reader. There are options for bloggers telling a story in WordPress to have posts display with episodes in a series much like a book chapter by chapter.

The first tutorial method is a simple modification of the code in your template. To display posts in reverse chronological order (oldest first) modify the index.php file in the wp-content/themes/[your theme]/ folder. Look for the line of code and above that add this line of code to have posts display in reverse ascending order.

The next tutorial advice is a WordPress plugin to handle sorting. To allow multiple options for the sort order, you may want to search WordPress for sorting plugins. Some provide options from the backend admin so you can set options for a variety of query types by date, time, author, and more, and then within each of those you may sort results with a second option. For example, the main sort could be by author with those results further sorted by a second field like category or date.

Caution: After reviewing several my advice is checking plugin compatibility to your WordPress installation version before installing.

Finally, this third tutorial and option comes from a WordPress hosted blog of poetry written by my late Grandmother. My choice was to override the WordPress default maximum posts listed, which is 15, and have all 39 poem titles listed alphabetically in the sidebar. After all poem content was prepared and later published in one day in a random order, I created a custom html/text widget to replace the list of recent posts with the alphabetical list of all poems here.

The custom html WordPress widget concept works when the blog content is fixed like that one-time list of all poems, or in a story that gets posted as episodes and the last chapter is published. Just add new links to the sidebar widget as new episodes are posted until complete.

There are more WordPress sort plugins and tutorials, and certainly may be new ones by the time you view this post. The good news is there are options for controlling post chronological sorts when telling a story in WordPress.