[FX.php List] looking for advice...

[Alex Gates]

Hi everyone-

I'm plagued with quite the design problem.

As I've mentioned before, I'm in the process of developing a web
application where users will be submitting recipes to a cookbook
project.
I've been racking my brain for the past week on the best way to allow
the users to create a custom sort order for the recipes in their book.

Thanks to this list, I have a very nice way of organizing the around 8
or so categories that people will set up for their cookbook.  From
there, however, I need an intuitive way to allow the user to customize
the order that they want the recipes to appear in each category.

It's very easy to set up the sort in the database to allow the recipes
to be sorted alphabetically by title or by contributor.  But, I can't
come up with the best way to allow the user to set a custom sort.

It's very possible that there could be 200+ recipes per category.  I
will want the user to be able to sort only one category at a time.

I really like the drag and drop method I'm using for my categories, but
I think a list of 200+ recipe titles will be incredibly too long.  On
top of that, the browser window won't scroll if you grab a recipe and
move it to the top of the page.  I'm not even sure if drag and drop is
the best way to do this.

Each recipe is currently submitted with in a layout with a blank field
called SortID.  When this is blank, of course, the recipes are displayed
in the order that they are submitted.  If a number is put in SortID,
then the recipes will be sorted according to that number.

So - even if I were to solve the scrolling method and put together a
drag and drop system, I'd need to do a foreach and add the sortID to
every single recipe in that category - and I imagine looping through and
editing 200+ recipes just to enter the sort ID would take quite a bit of
time.

Does anyone have any other ideas or suggestions?  I'm desperate here.  I
suppose I could automatically enter a number in the SortID and simply
display all the recipes in a table with an editable field allowing them
to change the sortID, but it doesn't seem very user friendly... and it
seems like quite a bit of work making the user change so many numbers if
they decide to move only one recipe.

Any suggestions or tips or criticisms would be very very greatly
appreciated.  I want something intuitive for the user that won't take a
long time to process in the database.

Thanks in advance...

Alex