Update: Okay, I realised this was actually only half of my issue. We also use the Topic Thumbnails theme component to display a gallery of the featured artworks. And the sort order of the gallery now didn’t match that of our featured row anymore, which confused visitors (and annoyed me). So the gallery had to be sorted by tagging date too - not just topic creation or last activity date.
And this is where I became a bad boy and turned to Claude Code to help me out. First, I had it create a small plugin to add an option to sort tag lists by tagging date, like /tag/featured?order=tag_date.
Once that worked, I updated the sorting option in the Homepage Feature TC by adding tag_date, replacing the clunky external JSON url I used before. I also changed the widget from checkboxes to a dropdown for a better UX:
Next I saw that the Topic Thumbnails theme component handles the new tagging order out of the box. By using /tag/featured/1?order=tag_date as the gallery URL I now have a featured row that acts the way I want it to (and, frankly, the way I believe it should 
), AND a gallery that matches:
If anyone wants to try, here’s my code:
- discourse-sort-by-tagging-date plugin
- Homepage Feature component with support for the new tag_date option
You can see it in action on https://blenderartists.org/
Fair warning: this is all Claude Code work. I reviewed what I could but ultimately I’m not an expert at this. BlenderArtists is a faily high traffic forum though, so I watched the performance impact carefully. I will keep these updated as needed as they’re a key part of our 3D graphics community.
Enjoy!