Magazine TOC - Control order of list about westernfriend.org

[marycklein]

A fall-back plan could be to set things up so that, on a page that lists all articles in an individual magazine issue, within each department, the articles would be listed alphabetically by family name of first author.

[brylie]

We initially agreed on alphabetical sorting, since it is conventional and pragmatic.

Adding manual or author-based sorting would introduce a couple of challenges:

1. Featured Articles: We currently mark these directly on the article pages for easy publishing. Sorting them by position during editing would be cumbersome, requiring the editor to constantly switch between articles and remember their sort order.
2. Sorting by Author's Last Name: This approach has two drawbacks:
   • It's not intuitive for users, as articles are listed by title, not author. Sorting by the author would be confusing since it's not the primary information displayed.
   • Technically, this would increase page loading times and complexity. The server would have to process a lot more information, sorting articles by the first-listed author's last name, which could slow down the site and burden the server.

Given these issues, and our goal to simplify and speed up the website, I think these sorting methods might complicate things rather than help. I'm keen on maintaining our focus on enhancing user experience through simplicity and efficiency.

Any thoughts on how we can address these sorting challenges without compromising our usability and performance?