Elementor Pro Page Builder: change Portfolio filter bar sorting

Elementor is a beautiful and easy to use Page Builder for WordPress. It has a Pro version, which includes a Portfolio module with a Filter Bar.
Since version 1.5.5 of Elementor Pro (released July 3rd, 2017) the items in this filter bar are sorted by name (A-Z). Unfortunately, that’s the standard and there is no way to change it in the settings.

But what if you want a different sorting? E.g. by ‘count’ (the number of posts in a category or tag), the order of items in the back-end (menu order), or just the default ordering of WordPress, which is by date.

This ‘hack’ involves going into core files of Elementor Pro, so you have to make a note of it, as the changes will be overwritten every time the plug-in is updated.

The sorting of filter bar items is done in the file
\elementor-pro\modules\posts\widgets\portfolio.php
around lines 585-587. It looks like this:

usort( $terms, function( $a, $b ) {
	return strcmp( $a->name, $b->name );
} );

To change this into sorting by menu order, make the following change:

usort( $terms, function( $a, $b ) {
	return $a->term_order - $b->term_order;
} );

(Note: you do NOT use ‘menu_order’ here as you would in query options, but ‘term_order’ instead.)

Save the file and enjoy the new sorting of your portfolio filter bar!

But, but, you may ask: “How do I change the order of e.g. categories?”
Well, there’s a handy free plug-in for that: Simple Custom Post Order.

We think Elementor should add filter bar sorting as an option, just as with the order of the portfolio posts themselves, so you’d have a choice of e.g. order by ‘Date’, ‘Title’, ‘Count’, ‘Menu Order’ or ‘Random’.

If you want to know more about the ‘usort’ function in PHP, you can check the PHP Manual.