Sort Articles By Rating In Joomla 2.5

The following tutorial will tell you how to sort articles in Joomla by rating

I needed to sort articles in a list category layout and here are the few changes that I made. I am sure they will be applicable on previous Joomla versions as well, or at least you will get the idea:

Open file 'components\com_content\models\articles.php'

Look for the following line (221 for my Joomla 2.5 version)
$query->select('ROUND(v.rating_sum / v.rating_count,0) AS rating, v.rating_count as rating_count');

It is currently rounding the rating for some unknown reason i.e. if you have 4 ratings that combine to make it 4.25, it will show 4 (rounded) instead of 4.25 so first I fixed this by replacing it with the following line:

$query->select('FORMAT(v.rating_sum / v.rating_count,2) AS rating, v.rating_count as rating_count');

(You can even remove the 'FORMAT' if you are fine with going it up to 4-5 decimals)

Once you are done with this, then comes the sorting part, go to the end of this function and look for the following line (463 for me)

$query->order($this->getState('list.ordering', 'a.ordering').' '.$this->getState('list.direction', 'ASC'));

And replace it with

$query->order(' rating DESC ');

And you are good to go.


Note: You may also want to add a column in the front end to show the ratings. If you want and your are in list view of category you can go to the following file:
'components/com_content/views/category/tmpl/default_articles.php'
and look for a 'foreach' loop at approximately the mid of the file, add  your column of rating along with hits, author columns.