Sort authors in a group

[gferman]

Hi, I created an academic webpage for my research group. I have a list of students in a group, and by default, they are sorted alphabetically using the first name. Is there a way to sort authors in a group by the last name instead? Thanks! -Gaston

[chrede88]

It's not straightforward! It requires some changes to the people.html partial and all the people displayed on your website.

Firstly people.html:

1. Place this file (https://github.com/wowchemy/wowchemy-hugo-modules/blob/master/wowchemy/layouts/partials/widgets/people.html) in ./layouts/partials/widgets/. Create the missing folders.
2. Change line 32 from {{ range $query }} to {{ range sort $query "Weight" }}
   Changing this line will sort the people within each group by the parameter weight.

Now add the parameter weight to all the people (authors) defined for your website.
For author <johndoe> add the parameter to ./content/authors/<johndoe>/_index.md

The sort is by default ascending, so weights have to reflect that. Let's say you have Alice Warner and William Hansen, then William should have a lower weight than Alice, if you want to sort by last name.

I would recommend using weights that differ by more than 1, so you can add more people later without having to change all the weights.

[chrede88]

Hard to say, you'll have to ask @gcushen;)
Adding the weights is easy, as it's build-in and only requires changing a few lines of code. If you would like to see this implemented in a future version of Wowchemy, you could open a PR.
As for firstname/lastname, it requires a bit more work. Right now names are passed through the .title variable. But it isn't too bad, and I think it could be implemented fairly easily.

[cschaffner]

I followed the same solution as above, but I added a "lastname" field to all authors, instead of a numerical weight. After that, I used
{{ range sort $query ".Params.lastname" "asc" }} to display people sorted according to last names.

[wangyufan216]

I followed the same solution as above too on my website, which is deployed via netlify, but it failed to build. Any idea why this would be?

[cschaffner]

It seems that things have moved now: widgets are now called "blocks" and are located in wowchemy-hugo-themes/modules/wowchemy/layouts/partials/blocks/v1/people.html . However, when I create my own people.html in /layouts/partials/blocks/v1 , it does not get loaded. Does @gferman know how to resolve this?

[gferman]

Unfortunately, I don't have a clue :/

I lost track of this issue and moved on...