On several pages you'll notice the weight setting. This controls the order in which the item appears in a list: lower weights float to the top and heavier weights sink to the bottom. The weight ranges from -10 to 10, giving 21 different values to choose from. If 2 items have the same weight then they will be ordered alphabetically by the title.
Most of the time when using the weight option, you will have fewer than 21 items. It is a good item to skip weight values inbetween items. This provides breathing room inbetween weight values should you want to add more items at a later date.
Let's say you have 4 items in a list that you want to apply an order to using the weight setting and the items are "About", "College", "Department", and "University". We want to list them in the order:
Approach one would be to give them all the default weight of 0. This would list them in alphabetical order and won't give us the desired results.
Approach two would be to start with the lowest weight of -10 and give each one the next consective weight; -9, -8 and -7. This would give us the desired results (weights in parenthesis):
But let's look at what will happen if we try to add another item. Let's try to add "Oregon" after "University". If we give "Oregon" a weight of -10, then "Oregon" will be listed above "University" because by title, "O" comes before "U". If we give "Oregon" a weight of -9, then "Oregon will be listed after "Department ", because "D" comes before "O". The only option we have is to give "Oregon" a weight of -9 and then go in and shift the weight of "Department" to -8. This will move "Department" under "College". Again, not desired. We have to continue this shift of the weights of each item until we get these results:
This is quite a pain and with even more items, it's even more of a pain.
The preferred approach would be to spread out the weights among each of the items:
This makes it much easier to add an item. Again let's use our example of "Oregon" after "University". We can give it any weight between -6 through -3, inclusive, to achieve our desired results. Following our approach of spreading the weights out, let's give it a weight of -5 (-4 would work just as well):
If the situation should come up where you've used up all of the weights with 21 items, there are still a couple things you can do to get the ordering you desire.
First, if 2 items have the same weight, then they will be ordered alphabetically by title. This may help free up some weight values.
Second, many times you can group the items in this list. This may be presented as obvious as a grouping or you may have to use a hierarchy of menus of menus. You can then give each group a weight, allowing you to order each group of items, while still ordering the items within each group. With just one level of groups, you can easily order 21 * 21, or 441 items. Each level of groups exponentially increases the number of items you can order.
