How to quickly reorder posts in the admin panel that will persist for the wp-api

Let’s assume it stores the custom order into the menu_order column in the wp_posts table.

If you mean the hierarchical page post type (supports page-attributes) then one can order with the query variables:

/wp-json/wp/v2/pages/?orderby=menu_order&order=asc

If you mean the post post type with:

/wp-json/wp/v2/posts/

there’s a way using the rest_{post_type}_query filter:

/**
 * Set orderby to 'menu_order' for the 'post' post type
 */
add_filter( "rest_post_query", function( $args, $request )
{
    $args['orderby'] = 'menu_order';
    return $args;
}, 10, 2 );

We might want to restrict this further. Skimming through the WP_REST_Request class we can see there’s a handy get_param() public method that we could make use of:

/**
 * Support for 'wpse_custom_order=menu_order' for the 'post' post type
 */
add_filter( "rest_post_query", function( $args, $request )
{
    if( 'menu_order' === $request->get_param( 'wpse_custom_order' ) )
        $args['orderby'] = 'menu_order';

    return $args;
}, 10, 2 );

where we activate it through a custom wpse_custom_order parameter:

/wp-json/wp/v2/posts/?wpse_custom_order=menu_order&order=asc

There’s also the dynamically generated rest_query_var-orderby filter.

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