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Setting courses sort order

How to set a custom sort order to list your courses exactly in your preferred sequence - for prospects, students, and instructors views.

G
Written by Glenn Morrow
Updated over a year ago

By default, Enlight orders your courses alphabetically by course title. But what if that doesn't suit your needs?

New method:

Use the new sort order field to set a specific sorting order for your courses. Any courses with a number will sort in numeric order first, then the courses without a number sort alphabetically after that. Simply edit the course as normal and find the new sort setting in the "Course Details" section, enter a number, then scroll to the bottom of the page and click "Save".

You can then clearly see the sort order in your main "Courses" list with the new "Sort" column. You should also see the courses are sorted in this way in the "Site Pages" > "Home" display, and in the student "Courses" screen, etc.

Simple! 😀

"Courses" page:

"Site Pages" > "Home" page:

Enrolled student "Courses" page:

"Course Pages: page: Note on this page the sort number is prefixed to the course title, just to make clear the sorting being used.

Tip: It is recommended to use larger numbers so you have plenty of gaps between each number. They still sort the same way but if you later want to insert a new course it is easy, just choose any number between the other two (e.g. if your existing courses are numbered "10" and "20" then your new course can be given any sort number between 11 and 19 to be sorted into the middle). However if you leave no gaps and need to insert new courses, or even change around the sort order of a few courses, you will have to edit several courses to make room/change things around. 😥

Old method:

Just for the record, you can still use the old-school trick method of prefixing your course titles with something that will sort in the order you wish (e.g. "001 - My first course", "003 - Another course", "012 - This course is last"). You can continue to do that and/or mix and match with the new method - as you wish.

Of course this does have issues like you need to pad out the prefix with leading "0"s or whatever, otherwise you get "computer sorted" numbers and end up with things like "1, 10, 11, 12, 2, 24, 25, 3 ... etc.". Also if you need to change the order or insert a new course you may have to change several prefixes - which could get messy or outright confusing (e.g. "001 - My first course" becomes "003 - My first course").

Additionally this does also mean the prefixed course title shows up everywhere the course is mentioned (i.e. all other screens, all reports, on the students views, etc.) although, depending on your needs, having each course designated by a specific number or code in addition to its actual title could be useful (that said, having a separate course code for each course is a feature we could implement later if desired - let us know if you want this).

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