Bracket Post Order
Bracket Post Order gives you complete control over how your content is sorted — directly from the native WordPress admin screens you already use. No new interfaces to learn, no separate reorder pages. Just drag and drop.
A key feature is per-term post ordering: the ability to define a different post order for each individual category, tag, or custom taxonomy term. Show your products in one order on “Summer Collection” and a completely different order on “Best Sellers” — each term maintains its own independent sort.
Three Types of Ordering
1. Global Post Ordering
Drag-and-drop to reorder posts, pages, and custom post types on the standard admin list table. The new order is saved to menu_order and automatically applied on the front end.
2. Per-Term Post Ordering Filter your admin list by a category or taxonomy term, and the interface switches to per-term mode. Drag posts into the order you want for that specific term. Assign the same post to multiple categories — each one keeps its own sort. New posts added to a term automatically appear at the end of the custom order.
3. Taxonomy Term Ordering
Reorder categories, tags, and custom taxonomy terms themselves via drag-and-drop on the native edit-tags.php screen. The new term order is applied to get_terms() queries and navigation menus on the front end.
Key Features
- Reset Order — Reset post order by date or title with one click. Most requested feature across all ordering plugins.
- Undo — “Order saved. [Undo]” link appears for 8 seconds after every reorder. Click to revert instantly.
- Mobile/Touch Support — Full touch drag-and-drop on phones and tablets via jQuery UI Touch Punch.
- Keyboard Accessibility — Tab to a row, Enter to activate, Arrow keys to move, Enter to save, Escape to cancel. WCAG compliant.
- Order Column — “#” column shows each post’s position number at a glance.
- WPML & Polylang Support — Per-term ordering works correctly across languages.
- Admin Bar Indicator — Shows current ordering mode (Global or Per-Term) in the admin bar.
- Settings Link — Quick access from the Plugins page.
How It Works
- Go to Settings > Bracket Post Order
- Toggle on the post types you want to reorder
- Toggle on taxonomies for per-term post ordering
- Toggle on taxonomies for term reordering
- Visit your admin list pages and start dragging
Changes save automatically via AJAX — no page refresh needed.
Built for WordPress, Not Against It
- Works directly inside native admin list tables (
edit.phpandedit-tags.php) - Uses standard
menu_orderfor global ordering — compatible with any theme - Uses
term_orderfor taxonomy terms — the same column WordPress defines - Per-term order stored as term meta — clean, portable, conflict-free
- Front-end queries are modified transparently via
pre_get_postsandposts_clauses - Explicit
orderbyparameters (date, title, etc.) are never overridden
Works With
- Any public custom post type (portfolios, team members, testimonials, events, FAQs, services)
- WooCommerce products and product categories
- Any registered taxonomy with a UI
- Page builders that use standard
WP_Query(Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder) - Themes that follow WordPress template hierarchy
- WPML and Polylang multilingual plugins
For Developers
Bracket Post Order provides hooks so you can extend or control its behavior:
// Filter: skip per-term ordering for a specific query
add_filter( 'bracket_po_apply_term_post_order', function( $apply, $term_id, $query ) {
// Return false to skip
return $apply;
}, 10, 3 );
// Filter: modify the retrieved term post order
add_filter( 'bracket_po_get_term_post_order', function( $ordered_ids, $term_id ) {
return $ordered_ids;
}, 10, 2 );
// Actions: fired after order is saved via drag-and-drop
do_action( 'bracket_po_global_order_updated', $post_ids );
do_action( 'bracket_po_term_post_order_updated', $term_id, $post_ids );
do_action( 'bracket_po_term_order_updated', $term_ids );
// Actions: fired after order is reset
do_action( 'bracket_po_global_order_reset', $post_type, $sort_by );
do_action( 'bracket_po_term_post_order_reset', $term_id );
To apply per-term order in custom queries, set orderby to menu_order and include a tax_query with a single term:
$query = new WP_Query( [
'post_type' => 'product',
'orderby' => 'menu_order',
'order' => 'ASC',
'tax_query' => [ [
'taxonomy' => 'product-category',
'field' => 'term_id',
'terms' => 42,
] ],
] );
The plugin will automatically apply the saved per-term order via FIELD() SQL — posts not in the saved order appear at the end.