Add sorting icons in your product table column headings. Your shoppers will be able to sort the products in the table by clicking on the column headings. Products can be sorted based on any product criteria, making it easier for your prospective customers to compare and find products in which they are most interested.
To do this you need to add the ‘Sorting’ element to your column heading.
Sorting by ‘Custom Field’
While sorting by custom field, please note the custom field type – number or text, and choose an option for ‘Sort by’ accordingly. If you select the wrong option, the sorting may malfunction in some cases.
If the custom field values are text type, you must select ‘Custom field as text’
And if the custom field values are numbers, you must select ‘Custom field as number’.
Sorting by ‘Attribute’
Note: Now you can sort by attributes, category and taxonomy using the convenient WCPT PRO v2.3.0+ sorting facilities! The below doc is not needed anymore. It is only left here for legacy purpose.
(You can use the same method described below for sorting by category or other taxonomy)
By default WooCommerce does not allow sorting based on product attributes. So we will use another route to achieve attribute based sorting. We will duplicate the attribute to custom field and then sort the products based on our new custom field that represents the attribute, thus creating the smart illusion that the products are getting sorted by attribute.
To duplicate the attribute to custom field, you can either go to each product’s page and manually do the duplication or choose one of these more efficient methods to vastly speed up the process.
Once you have added a new custom field to each product with the attribute term as the value, you can not sort the column by the custom field, and in effect, it will appear as if the column is being sorted by an attribute.
You can see the same system working very well for the WCPT PRO demos.
Let’s take an example: In the following screenshot from the ‘Courses’ demo, consider the ‘Subject’ column. ‘Subject’ is a WooCommerce attribute for the products in this table. However, you can see the sorting is working for this column.
Each Course product has a term set for the ‘Subject’ attribute.
Each Course product is also given a ‘Subject’ custom field with a corresponding value matching the attribute term for the product.
The custom field section can be revealed on any product editor page by using the ‘Screen Options’ tab at the top right of the page. The custom field section will appear further down on the page.
For more information on how to set custom fields, please check the WordPress documentation on custom fields.
Continuing with our example: Now in the table settings > Columns, in the heading of the Subject column, a ‘Sorting’ element is added. It is configured to sort the column by ‘Custom field as text’ when the heading is clicked. And the ‘Custom field’ is set to ‘Subject’.
And therefore, the column becomes sortable by the WC attribute ‘Subject’.