The new 2.7.7 version is now live on the Downloads page and brings in some category and document sorting improvements suggested by one of my many awesome users!

Specifically, this release brings in the ability for DOCman List to use Natural Sorting within your Category and Document Titles or Alias values!

This is really useful when you have numeric values within your titles or aliases and you would want the list to be sorted numerically in the correct way (as a human might do) rather than how the computer does it by default when retrieving the data from the database.

To illustrate if you had the following Category Titles the database would sort them this way by default:

docmanlist with default sort 2016-04-16

But this is not the way a human would sort things since the "Contrato 1001-2015" folder and file would have been placed at the end of each of the lists shown above if a human had sorted the lists :-)!

Now with the new Natural Sorting feature, once turned on you would get this more human result instead (in the following example both the Category and Document Natural Sort Options have been set to Yes):

docmanlist with natural sort 2016-04-16

The Plugin Configuration now shows these new options within the Ordering Options subtab.

If you'd rather use the Option Keys to change the configuration settings on the fly for specific circumstances on your site you may use the following option keys to turn things on/off:

  • useCategoryDefaultSort
  • useCategoryNaturalSort
  • useDocumentDefaultSort
  • useDocumentNaturalSort
Here are some examples:
docmanlist default sort option keys 2016-04-16
docmanlist natural sort option keys 2016-04-16

Additionally, I've posted a copy of the automatic documentation that the plugin can output for you for easy reference: DOCman List 2.7.7 Documentation.

Version 2.7.7 Changelog

Please note again that this release DOES NOT work with the older DOCman 1.6.x version since DOCman 2.0's architecture is much different and I wasn't able to share the codebase easily.

2.7.7 2016-04-16 / Omar Ramos
+ Added ability to perform natural case category sort (Option Keys: useCategoryDefaultSort, useCategoryNaturalSort)
+ Added ability to perform natural case document sort (Option Keys: useDocumentDefaultSort, useDocumentNaturalSort)
! Natural case sorting is useful for when you have numeric values in your Category or Document Titles and want them to be sorted the way a human might sort them since by default the database tends to sort them incorrectly (e.g. 10, 11, 100, 50, 70 would be the default result and 10, 11, 50, 70, 100 would be the natural sort result).

Want to see what other features DOCman List has? Check out the Features page! Want to see the plugin in action? Check out the DOCman List Plugin's Example page on our Demo Site (unfortunately I haven't created a new demo site to feature newer DOCman List Features available in version 2.6.0 and newer of the plugin) and our new DOCman List How to Video Series on Youtube!