Group entries by section, then order and combine sections

Question

I'm grouping search results by section, based on Aaron Berkowitz's answer to this question. My code looks like this:

{% set entries = craft.entries({search: {query: keywords} }) %}
{% set entriesBySection = entries | group('section') %}

{% for section, entries in entriesBySection %}
    <h2>{{ section }}</h2>
    <ul>
        {% for entry in entries %}
            <li>{{ entry.title }}</li>
        {% endfor %}
    </ul>
{% endfor %}

That works great but I need to show the sections in a specific order, and merge some sections into one. So I'd end up with, for example:

• News
• Products
• Reports
• Other (everything else combined)

Any idea how to do this?

Thanks loads for any help!

Answer 1

You could do this in a few steps (warning: this is untested code):

1) Define an array of the sections you cited, in the correct order:

{# Define a list of the sections you want to display in the correct order #}
{% set sections = ['news', 'products', 'reports'] %}

2) Identify the entries that do not belong in any of these sections:

{# Create an array of entries that do not belong to any of the sections above #}
{% set otherEntries = [] %}

{# We first loop on the entries by section to identify the "other" entries #}
{% for section, entries in entriesBySection %}
    {% if section in sections %}
        {% for entry in entries %}
            {% set otherEntries = otherEntries|merge([entry])}
        {% endfor %}
    {% endif %}
{% endfor %}

3) Display all the entries of each section in the correct order

{# Loop on the sections in the right order #}
{% for section in sections %}
    {# Obtain all the entries for the current section #}
    {% set entries = entriesBySection[section] %}
    {% for entry in entries %}
        ...
    {% endfor %}
{% endfor %}

4) Display the rest of the entries

{# Finally display the "other" entries #}
{% for entry in otherEntries %}
    ...
{% endfor %}