All we wanted to do was spit out a list of authors and sort by a custom field instead of by name. Should be simple, right? Let’s check the documentation. Seems to state that this is possible… but no dice.
Oh well, that’s why we bought the commercial version, so we could have support monkeys answer these annoying questions for us, right? Let’s fire off an email to see if we are perhaps… missing something obvious.
To their credit, we got back a response relatively quickly. The only problem is, it’s a useless one:
From: Movable Type Support <[email protected]>Date: February 17, 2009 7:38:34 PM ESTTo: *****@firefall.ioSubject: Response to Movable Type support ticket 'Sorting by Custom Fields' Movable Type Customer Support has responded to your ticket'Sorting by Custom Fields'. This email notification has beenautomatically sent by Movable Type Customer Support. DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL. Instead, please click the link belowto view and respond to your ticket. Hi - Unfortunately, the <mt:author> template tag currently does not support sorting by a custom user field. Regards David Phillips Technical Services
Dan, Isn’t it strange how documentation by large companies sometimes lacks accuracy? I’m always surprised at how often documentation is poorly written, incomplete, and ill presented, especially on the web. I tried to distill some of those thoughts in a recent blog post, Does Your Documentation Suck. There are some good examples out there, but all too often users continue to be frustrated by bad documentation.