Display entries tagged with specific tag(s) before other entries

Question

What I'm trying to accomplish is looping through a collection of entries and have them display (with pagination) in the following order:

• entries tagged as Featured in alphabetical (title) order
• entries tagged as New in alphabetical (title) order
• all remaining entries in alphabetical (title) order

The following worked:

craft.entries({ order: 'featuredLightswitchField desc, title asc' })

However it fails to work if you try to use two lightswitch fields (e.g. featured and new) in addition to the title ordering, and I'd prefer to keep things tag-based instead of needing to add lightswitch fields.

I also attempted at creating a custom array of entry IDs in the proper order and passing it to craft.entries.id(), however I can't find a way of keeping the entries in the order of the array passed to craft.entries.id().

craft.entries({ id: [3, 1, 2] })
// can't find a way to keep entries in [3, 1, 2] order.

If there was a way to order the entries based off the id array that would solve the problem, unless there's a better solution.

Can provide additional information if my explanation is insufficient.

Answer 1

You're on the right track with merging arrays of entry IDs. And to keep the sort order with your new craft.entries call there's in fact a method for that: fixedOrder(true).