One of our common requests is for a way to manually sort articles.

Current Workaround: This can be currently be done in a fairly non-intuitive way by setting the sort field to Publish Date and then manually manipulate the publish date for the Articles as needed.

We need a better system and are debating the best approach. Here are some options:
1.) Sort Order field: A text box where users can enter a number and articles would be sorted by that number. This is fairly standard in DNN modules and provides flexibility but is not particularly intuitive or elegant.

2.) Arrows/Drag-n-drop: Editors would see up/down arrows next to each article that they could click to move the article up or down in the list. This approach can't really be used with Articles since an Article can appear in many different Articles modules. So the sorting this way wouldn't make sense as it relies on the relationship between articles that is dynamic. One complication with the approach is an article can be displayed in A sort order field to manually indicate the order of articles. I often find myself using Sort By Publish Date and manually altering the publish date so Articles appear the way I need.

3.) User promotion/Voting: Articles can be sorted based on the number of votes it receives. This lets users promote or "Buzz Up" their favorite articles. Users would be limited in the number of votes they can award or only be allowed to vote for a particular article once. To enforce proper voting, we would need to be able to limit to logged in users and/or limit by IP for anonymous voting.
3b.) This could also allow an admin only option where only admins can vote and are allowed an unlimited number of votes.

4.) User/Admin Ranking/Rating: Let users and/or admin Rank an article and let the articles be sorted by rank. The rank stuff could be set to only be visible to Admins to allow only admins to affect sort order. Initially, we would probably limit ranking to registered users.

What do you think? Do you have a preferred option among these ideas or other better ideas?

My current leaning is for option 4, Ranking and Ratings because it would be fairly easy to implement, yet flexible and would meet the need.

As part of this, we would also probably allow Admins to specify a primary sort field (e.g. Rating) and a secondary sort field (e.g. Creation Date). And we'll add ASC/DESC for each option.