I am using a custom field with a simple integer value to order my posts, but they’re not sorting correctly. Why?
Short answer: you need to zero-pad the integers if you want them to sort numerically. (‘001′, ‘002′, ‘010′, etc.) This is a side effect of the WordPress data design. The ‘meta_value’ field in the wp_postmeta table is defined as type ‘longtext’. This means that any integer stored in the meta_value field is automatically converted into a string. Therefore any sort on the meta_value field is a string sort, not an integer sort. In a string sort, ‘10′ comes before ‘2′. That is why it is necessary to zero-pad the integers in order to sort them numerically. Note that you do not have this problem when sorting on menu_order, because the menu_order field is defined as type ‘int’. So if you want to use simple integers to sort your posts, it would be better to do it using a plugin like PostMash which stores the values in the menu_order field.
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