Magda Sicknick

The plugin allows users to turn on taxonomies they would like to order and drag and drop to a desired position.

Custom Taxonomy Order

Tubal

A really simple and lightweight plugin (73 lines of code – comments included) to sort posts on-the-fly without making a new query to the database (improves performance).
<h4>Features:</h4>
<ul>
<li>Supports all <code>order_by</code> and <code>order</code> values of the <a href="https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/query_posts#Orderby_Parameters" rel="nofollow ugc">query_posts function</a> except <code>meta_value</code> and <code>meta_value_num</code> (which require a database query).</li>
<li>Supports changing the order of all types of posts, including custom post type posts and custom post type “archive” posts.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Documentation</h4>
This plugin adds the function <code>sort_query_posts_by(string $order_by [, string $order])</code> to the global context. 
The second <code>$order</code> parameter is optional. Its default value is <code>asc</code> (ascending order).
Call this function before <a href="https://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop" rel="nofollow ugc">the loop</a> to change how posts are ordered. 
After calling this function you can show the posts as you normally would.
You can sort posts by:
<ul>
<li>author</li>
<li>comment_count</li>
<li>date</li>
<li>id</li>
<li>menu_order</li>
<li>modified</li>
<li>parent</li>
<li>title</li>
</ul>
This is specially useful in two cases:
<ul>
<li>When you need to reorder the posts returned by the query that WordPress creates from your given URL. Custom post type “archive” posts are a great example of this case.</li>
<li>When you need the posts returned by your customized query (e.g. <code>query_posts()</code>) to be shown more than once on the same page and ordered differently.</li>
</ul>
Examples:
<pre><code><?php sort_query_posts_by('title', 'desc'); ?>
</code></pre>
The example above will sort posts by their title in descending order without making a new query to the database. 
This way sorting is performance friendly.
<pre><code><?php sort_query_posts_by('ID'); ?>
</code></pre>
The example above will sort posts by their ID in ascending order.
<pre><code><?php sort_query_posts_by('rand'); ?>
</code></pre>
The example above will sort posts randomly. When sorting randomly <code>$order</code> is ignored.
Plugin developed by Túbal Martín at <a href="http://www.margenn.com" rel="nofollow ugc">www.margenn.com</a>.

Sort Query Posts

Sort posts on-the-fly without making a new SQL query

Custom Taxonomy Order vs Sort Query Posts