fix for #6489

[AndyGaskell]

Change to make the secondary ordering consistent and more useful. Related to #6489.

I'm not really sure if this is a bug, but to me it looks like a sub-optimal behavior, from a conceptual point of view. It is really, how the articles are sorted, in addition to the option chosen by the user.

Steps to reproduce the issue

1. Create three articles, "article 1", "article 2" and "article 3", created in that order.
2. Set the "Article Manager Options", under the "Shared Options" tab, set the "Article Order" to "Ordering".
3. In the front end, view a "Articles » Category List" page.
4. You'll see the articles are in the order "article 1", "article 2" then "article 3".

Expected result

This is maybe a subtlety, but although I set the list to sort by ordering, if all items have the same "ordering" value, I would expect the newest to be at the top. So they would be listed as "article 3", "article 2" then "article 1".

Actual result

You'll see the articles are in the order "article 1", "article 2" then "article 3".

System information (as much as possible)

PHP Built On Linux penguin.directrouter.co.uk 2.6.32-531.23.3.lve1.2.66.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Sep 12 10:57:40 EDT 2014 x86_64
Database Version 5.6.23
Database Collation latin1_swedish_ci
PHP Version 5.4.38
Web Server Apache
WebServer to PHP Interface cgi-fcgi
Joomla! Version Joomla! 3.4.0 Stable [ Ember ] 24-February-2015 23:00 GMT
Joomla! Platform Version Joomla Platform 13.1.0 Stable [ Curiosity ] 24-Apr-2013 00:00 GMT
User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:36.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/36.0

Additional comments

I realize this is quite a subtle one, but it seemed worth mentioning. It is a one-line fix in the code, which I'd be happy to submit.

To a degree it would resolve an inconsistency. There are other areas where "created DESC" is used, so the behavior described above seems an anomaly.

Examples of "created DESC" being used can be found at...

components/com_content/models/featured.php
Line 130: $orderby = $primary . ' ' . $secondary . ' a.created DESC ';

components/com_content/models/archive.php
Line 84: $orderby = $primary . ' ' . $secondary . ' a.created DESC ';

But the code that causes this to be different is...

components/com_content/models/category.php
Line 312: $orderby .= $primary . ' ' . $secondary . ' a.created ';

So, there is an argument that this is a bug because within "components/com_content" this is the odd-one-out.

[phproberto]

I have edited the PR to add #6489 information

[infograf768]

I can't replicate the issue here. I do get article 3 then 2 then 1.

@AndyGaskell
Maybe unrelated, but your database is not collated as should: it should be utf8 and not latin Swedish
You can use a tool to correct the db and eventually the tables:
http://www.phoca.cz/download/category/17-phoca-changing-collation-tool

[AndyGaskell]

@infograf768 Thanks for the note Jean-Marie, I think phpMyAdmin installed on my ubuntu dev machine with the wrong package, so was doing this for a while. I think this is unrelated to the bug, but I'll check.
I was sad to read you "Every adventure has an end" post last month, thank you for all your help and contributions over the years, you're a giant among giants.

[AndyGaskell]

I've found a bug in this fix that causes an error in some use cases.

I think the issue is still valid, but this fix is not a good one.

[brianteeman]

@AndyGaskell have you found a "good" fix or shall I close this issue for now

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[brianteeman]

After several months without update I am closing this at this time. It can always be reopened at a later date

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