The attached screenshot is of a course I am running using Discourse. It’s spread over four weeks, and the students are asking for me to order the assignments chronologically. I can’t find a way to do this? Is it possible?
Lee
AI-generated summary
The discussion revolves around ordering topics chronologically in Discourse. Lee_Davy2 seeks a way to display course assignments in chronological order, as they are currently sorted by recent activity. pfaffman suggests adjusting the category settings to sort by creation date, while Falco confirms this can be done via the ‘Topic List Sort By’ setting and offers a method to manually reorder topics using the 
button to adjust timestamps Falco. Lee_Davy2 acknowledges the solution and plans to implement it. D8vid then inquires about enabling users to choose the sort order themselves, such as via a created option in the topic list. Falco suggests this can be achieved with a theme component rather than a plugin, prompting D8vid to explore theme component development further.
They are in order of most recent activity, though I think that they can be changed with a theme component.
What I did was create a syllabus topic that linked to stuff. You can see it https://forum.literatecomputing.com/t/syllabus-edm510-2016-summer/2970
No need for a theme component.
Edit the category where the topics are, in the settings change " Topic List Sort By" to created.
If necessary, you can use the 
button in the topic to change timestamps to re-order.
Once I have set them in ‘Order Created’ is there a way of moving individual posts around? I ask because moving forward, setting it to Order Created for a new course will work, but not for this current course because the order of posts has been all over the place.
You mean topics right?
This should be doable by:
Inside a topic, in the top right, above the blue scroll bar you should see the Wrench button, that can “Change Timestamp” of a topic.
Ok, so laborious, but I can change each one individually.
Thanks for all your help.
Lee
Is there a way to enable users to select this sort view on their own?
E.g. by adding a created option to top menu and/or topic list action?
I haven’t yet written a plugin; would this be a good case for such an attempt?
You can do this in a theme component, which is easier than a plugin.
Ooo, thanks for the tip!
A site where I admin uses an ‘archive’ tag, and chronological topic view of tagged topics would be very useful. I better get studying on writing theme components…
I suppose I should ask, so I begin to look in the correct places,
Would a theme component allow for configuration via topic list action, or would it use another mechanism?
Is there an index on the topic created (date) field?