How to sort custom field date in Wordpress outside loop

Question

I am trying to sort pages by a custom field which has the 'yyyy/mm/dd' format. The problem I have is no matter what I have tried I keep getting the list back in alphabetical order by title.

Is there anyway to do a query outside the loop and have the pages returned in the sorted order?

$args = array(
    'parent' => 462, 
    'child_of' => 462,
    'sort_column' => 'Date',
    'post_status' => 'publish',
    'sort_order' => 'ASC'
); 
$pageposts = get_pages($args);

I did try with this as well, but I still cannot seem to get it to work.

$args = array(
    'meta_key' => 'Date',
    'orderby' => 'meta_value_num',
    'parent' => 462, 
    'child_of' => 462,
    'post_status' => 'publish',
    'order' => 'ASC'
); 
$pageposts = get_pages($args);

I did try with meta_value as well as meta_value_num. I am completely lost and am not really understanding why I cannot figure this out. Thank you all in advance for any help. I know this may be remedial to most, so I really appreciate it.

Answer 1

You need to use your custom query because wordpress get_pages,get_posts will sort the meta_value as string so if you use the above functions your field will be treated as the string not the date here is the example you can add further your conditions in the query

global $wpdb;
$query = "
        SELECT wp.*
        FROM $wpdb->posts wp, $wpdb->postmeta wm
        WHERE wp.ID = wm.post_id
        AND wm.meta_key = 'Date'
        AND wp.post_status = 'publish'
        AND wp.post_type = 'page'
        AND wp.post_parent = '462'
        ORDER BY STR_TO_DATE(wm.meta_value, '%m/%d/%Y') ASC
        ";

    $pages = $wpdb->get_results($query, OBJECT);

Note* The date must be inputted in the American format ie 21/02/2009 for it to work *

Hope it makes sense

Answer 2

只需使用'sort_column'=>'post_date'，