You can set article order for any given category quite easily from the Article Manager (Site -> Control Panel -> Article Manager), using the up down arrow keys or by typing in an article number.

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If you have multiple Categories in your Joomla! website, Joomla! orders the articles it independently from the other categories. 

Ordering articles on the Front Page is a little tricker though. By default, the articles are ordered by the article ID (which is assigned when the articve is created) and not the publication date. This means that if you pre-record a number of articles and have them automatically publish at future dates, they won’t show up in publication order on the Front Page if you have posted other articles (having a larger article ID)  after the pre-recorded ones.

To change article ordering on the Front Page it is necessary to go to edit the Main Menu settings. Go to Menus -> Main Menu. Then select the Home menu item. Go to Parameters (Advanced) and set the Primary Order to Most Recent First. This will now display entries published to the home page in chronological order, instead of article ID order.

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You can also change the article ordering on the Home Page to display the articles with the most hits or least hits.

Article Motivation

Going away for the weekend, I had written up a few blog entries to be automatically published on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

When I returned, I was surprised to discover the articles were not displayed in the order I expected them to be because I had posted another article after I had created the pre-recorded ones.

Installation 

I installed Joomla! 1.5 using the Fantastico installer available from my web host. It is available from many web hosting services and makes installing various bits of software on your site quite easy.

I would recommend installing Joomla! with the sample data first and playing around with it to get a feel for it. Oce you decide you want to go with Joomla! then uninstall it and reinstall it without the sample data (this just leaves you with a bare skeleton). I had tried deleting the sample data, but ran into problems because it seems I also managed to delete all the online help files.