Admin Page Tree sorted by '-sort'

[horst]

EDIT: is OBSOLETE because could be done by Module http://processwire.com/talk/topic/4758-release-pagetree-add-new-childs-reverse/

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When a site display an overview of the latest posts, news, images, etc. the newest entries should be on top of the list. We can achieve that by using an automated setting for the sortfield e.g. when the page was created = "-created".
 
This way we are not able to manually move a single page in the tree. But there are needs for people to do that and it is asked for this multiple times here in the forums. E.g. if you display image thumbs and the last five entries don't harmonize well together, you want to move 1-3 pages down or up - but in generally you are very happy with the sortorder -created.
 
Using a workaround like creating a sticky field and check that is very ugly IMO. It isn't reflected in the AdminPageTree and therefor not very intuitive and not very straight forward.
 
While I have found a solution to achieve this "-sort" with importing pages via API, it would be nice to also have it with manually created pages.
 
Viewing the source the situation seems to be that there is a real chance to allow it:

1. sort must be enabled for using reverse sorting direction (sort and -sort)
2. the sort field in Mysql-DB is of type signed integer, maybe negative values could be allowed to achieve that
3. or maybe the startvalue could be between 0 and max?

Edited October 18, 2013 by horst