Hi Nik,

First of all thanks for having a look.

What I've posted is the default code from the Umbraco Starter Kit's 'LatestBlogPosts' Partial View Macro.

I haven't changed anything o the code. I can confirm that there is no "PublicationDate" property on the doc type.

I already tried to change that to 'CreateDate' or tried if it would work to change the sorting to ascending.

None of the above would solve it. It appears that the posts are sorted by the sort order number they are assigned when creating the blog post in the Content section in the back end.

But how could I use that? Any suggestions?

Hi Robert,

I've just spun up a completely clean Umbraco 7.13.1 install and added the starter kit.

First thing I've noticed is that the LatestBlogPosts Macro Partial View doesn't make any reference to "PublicationDate", it has the following line var blogposts = startNode.Children.OrderByDescending(x => x.CreateDate).ToList();

Also, when the starter kit is installed, at least in my situation, the blogs all have the same CreateDate (I suspect milliseconds might be different but from what I can see they have the same date and same time) so sorting could vary slightly. However, it does appear to be showing them in the correct order.

To test this, I waited a couple of minutes and then added my own blog post. When I visited the "Blog" page of the test site my blog that I added appeared at the top as expected.

I'm curious, are you sure no one has modified the partial view macro code?

For reference, this is the entire contents of the partial view file after a clean install:

@using ContentModels = Umbraco.Web.PublishedContentModels;
@using Umbraco.Web;
@inherits Umbraco.Web.Macros.PartialViewMacroPage
@{
    var startNodeId = Model.MacroParameters["startNodeId"] != null ? Model.MacroParameters["startNodeId"] : Model.Content.Id;
    var numberOfPosts = 3;
    if (Model.MacroParameters["numberOfPosts"] != null)
    {
        int.TryParse((string)Model.MacroParameters["numberOfPosts"], out numberOfPosts);
    }
}
@if (startNodeId != null)
{
    @* Get the starting page *@
    var startNode = Umbraco.TypedContent(startNodeId);
    //Gets all blogposts to calculate pages
    var blogposts = startNode.Children.OrderByDescending(x => x.CreateDate).ToList();
    var pageCount = (int)Math.Ceiling((double)blogposts.Count / (double)numberOfPosts);
    //gets the page from the querystring and sets it to one if it is out of range
    var page = 1;
    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(Request.QueryString["page"]))
    {
        int.TryParse(Request.QueryString["page"], out page);
        if (page <= 0 || page > pageCount)
        {
            page = 1;
        }
    }
    //Gets the blogposts for the current page
    var pagedBlogposts = blogposts.Skip((page - 1) * numberOfPosts).Take(numberOfPosts).ToList();

    if (pagedBlogposts.Count > 0)
    {
        <div class="blogposts">

            @foreach (ContentModels.Blogpost post in pagedBlogposts)
            {
                <a href="@post.Url" class="blogpost">
                    <div class="blogpost-meta">
                        <small class="blogpost-date">@post.CreateDate.ToShortDateString()</small>
                        <small class="blogpost-cat">
                            @Html.Partial("~/Views/Partials/CategoryLinks.cshtml", post.Categories)
                        </small>
                    </div>
                    <h3 class="blogpost-title">@post.PageTitle</h3>
                    <div class="blogpost-excerpt">@post.Excerpt</div>
                </a>
            }
        </div>
    }

    if (blogposts.Count > numberOfPosts)
    {
        <div class="pagination">
            <nav class="nav-bar nav-bar--center">
                @if (page <= 1)
                {
                    <span class="nav-link nav-link--black nav-link--disabled">Prev</span>
                }
                else
                {
                    <a class="nav-link nav-link--black" href="@(Model.Content.Url + "?page=" + (page - 1))">Prev</a>
                }

                @for (int i = 1; i <= pageCount; i++)
                {
                    <a class="nav-link nav-link--black @(page == i ? "nav-link--active" : null)" href="@(Model.Content.Url + "?page=" + i)">@i</a>
                }
                @if (page == pageCount)
                {
                    <span class="nav-link nav-link--black nav-link--disabled">Next</span>
                }
                else
                {
                    <a class="nav-link nav-link--black" href="@(Model.Content.Url + "?page=" + (page + 1))">Next</a>
                }

            </nav>
        </div>
    }
}

(This can also be seen on the GitHub repository for the starter kit: https://github.com/umbraco/The-Starter-Kit/blob/master/src/Umbraco.SampleSite.Website/Views/MacroPartials/LatestBlogposts.cshtml )

I'm curious as to if something else has interfered with your install/views resulting in you not seeing the expected behaviour?

Thanks

Nik

Hi Nik,

Thanks a lot for sharing that. You are right, some differences in the code are there. That might be due to a friend helped me earlier to get the thumbnail images on the Latest Blog Posts using the Featured Image property I added to the doctype.

I have just changed one partial line of code to the default code you shared from your clean installation.

var blogposts = startNode.Children.OrderByDescending(x => x.CreateDate).ToList();

Have added a test blog post to verify it is sorting by creation date in desc order.

Only thing now is that I, of course, would like to get them sorted by date published instead.

Hi Robert,

There is an UpdatedDate (I think) property that you could use which relates to the last time the document was published.

However, what I would do is add a Date property onto the document type called "ArticleDate" or "PostDate" so you can assign a specific date to an article. The reason I would do this is because do you really want a 2 week old post suddenly appearing at the top when you've just had to fix a typo you've noticed?

I never use the CreatedDate or the UpdatedDate for sorting for this reason :-)

Just some food for thought.

Nik

Hi Nik,

That sounds like a proposal worth consideration.

I would not use the updated date to sort the blog posts though.

Implementing a date property could give what i am looking for.

Will have a thought about that.

Wishing you a good night for now ;)

Hi Robert,

Assuming you called the Property Article Date, it's alias would be articleDate.

So to access it you'd do:

var blogposts = startNode.Children.OrderByDescending(x=> x.GetPropertyValue<DateTime>("articleDate")).ToList();

Thanks

Nik

Hi Nik,

I tried the following code as I'm using a date picker only:

var blogposts = startNode.Children.OrderByDescending(x=> x.GetPropertyValue<Date>("articleDate")).ToList();

That is causing a compiler error stating that the namespace name or Type "Date" is not found

Sorry for all the hassle, as you surely can tell I am not a developer, just a newbie trying to build a website for my wife and her blog project

Hi Nik,

Super. I changed the code that way and recognised one more thing that I wasn't aware of:

 @foreach (ContentModels.Blogpost post in pagedBlogposts)
        {
            <a href="@post.Url" class="blogpost">
                <div class="blogpost-meta">
                    <small class="blogpost-date">@post.ArticleDate.ToLongDateString()</small>

I still had

@post.CreateDate.ToLongDateString()

instead of @post.ArticleDate.ToLongDateString

Now it's working perfectly.

Thanks a lot for all your help and patience.

Best Robert

Hi Robert,

Absolutely no problem, pleased you've managed to get it all working :-)

Thanks

Nik