Today I had to change Magento default products list sorting to sort by product’s date. In fact we don’t need to sort by date, just by entity_id which is product ID in Magento world. To accomplish this, we need to edit /app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/Block/Product/List.php
You have to find _beforeToHtml() function and change some things inside. First we need to define all available sorting options:
$orders = array('entity_id' => $this->__('Newest'), 'name' => $this->__('Name'), 'price' => $this->__('Price') );
then remove all getters of default sorting and order, and put those:
$toolbar->setAvailableOrders($orders); $toolbar->setDefaultOrder('entity_id'); $toolbar->setDefaultDirection('desc');
so finally your _beforeToHtml() should looks like this one:
protected function _beforeToHtml() { $toolbar = $this->getToolbarBlock(); // called prepare sortable parameters $collection = $this->_getProductCollection(); // use sortable parameters $orders = array('entity_id' => $this->__('Newest'), 'name' => $this->__('Name'), 'price' => $this->__('Price') ); $toolbar->setAvailableOrders($orders); $toolbar->setDefaultOrder('entity_id'); $toolbar->setDefaultDirection('desc'); if ($modes = $this->getModes()) { $toolbar->setModes($modes); } // set collection to tollbar and apply sort $toolbar->setCollection($collection); $this->setChild('toolbar', $toolbar); Mage::dispatchEvent('catalog_block_product_list_collection', array( 'collection'=>$this->_getProductCollection(), )); $this->_getProductCollection()->load(); Mage::getModel('review/review')->appendSummary($this->_getProductCollection()); return parent::_beforeToHtml(); }