Date sorting working improperly on production server

[ghost]

I've just deployed a new site running Grav 1.4.0 and have experienced issues when sorting Page Collections by date.

When developing the site locally (on AMPPS 3.7), I ran into a different date sorting problem, which I reported (#1810) and has been fixed in 1.4.

However, once I moved the site onto the production server, the same sorting operations were producing very erratic results, for which I couldn't ascertain a pattern (it seemed like blocks of items were sorting correctly, but the blocks were out of order).

The fix for the production server was to undo the change made in #1810: switching date sorting from SORT_NUMERIC back to SORT_REGULAR. I'm sorting using the standard page.collection() method and also by running order() on an already retrieved page collection in Twig.

I assume this is a server configuration issue, but I don't know what to look for. Can you provide any guidance?

[rhukster]

Oh the irony!!!! :) I think it probably makes sense to have a config option to toggle between these two sorting types. It seems you are running on some specific filesystems that are tripping up PHP sorting.

[ghost]

@rhukster You said it, especially as I waited until 1.4.0 released to deploy the website :-)

Having investigated further I'm thinking the issue is related to 32-bit vs 64-bit PHP: AMPPS (which I use for local dev) is 32-bit, and my web hosting server is 64-bit.

If this is the issue then rather than having a settings toggle (which is another thing to re-set when deploying, and then handle in version control) it may be better to switch out the sort flag dependent on platform bitness:

// PHP_INT_SIZE: 4 = 32-bit; 8 = 64-bit
$sort_flag = (PHP_INT_SIZE == 4) ? SORT_NUMERIC : SORT_REGULAR;

As a fallback, I'd say the default setting of the sort flag should be SORT_REGULAR, as its quirks would likely affect fewer sites (those that sort pages by date where the dates are before 1970, on 32-bit systems).

[ghost]

@rhukster After having a play with the buildSort() method from Pages.php I've found a combination of sort flags that works for both my local and server configurations. First, lines 1204-6:

case 'date':
    $list[$key] = $child->date();
    $sort_flags = SORT_REGULAR;

Then, lines 1279-81:

} else {
    asort($list, SORT_REGULAR);
}

I don't know how this would effect other sorts however.