Order a WP_Query by meta value where the value is an array

At query level? Not possible.

{db_prefix}_postmeta has only one field for value. WP serializes arrays before inserting them and deserializes after they’re out. So you have three choices here:

  1. If you really need this sorting at query level (pagination, maybe?) you have to rethink your information architecture and start using a separate custom_post_meta field for each field that you want to sort by.

  2. Forget sorting.

  3. If your number of items is limited and it’s going to remain limited, you could pull them all out with (posts_per_page=-1) and sort them with array_multisort(). As you might expect, this will slow the page down a bit (depending on the total number of posts that have that particular custom_post_meta).

As a variant to option 1, for performance reasons, depending on number of items and complexity of data, you might consider not using custom_post_meta at all, but store it in a separate custom table.

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