I created a drupal view to display contributor names. The view displays civicrm fields, both custom fields I have created and out-of-the-box civicrm fields.
The contributors are displayed according to the amount of their contribution. For instance, there are "Gold" contributors at the top, then "Silver", then "Bronze" etc.
The categories that contributors should be displayed within is not related to the total amount of the contribution. So, for instance, I have a "Silver" contributor that gave more than a "Gold" contributor (for reasons related to an event).
The problem is how to sort the fields so that the "Gold" group displays higher up than the "Silver" group. I cannot use Total Amount (desc) because of this silly Silver contribution that was more than the Gold contribution.
I tried creating a custom field where these groups of contributions were simply assigned numbers, so Gold=1, Silver=2, Bronze=3, etc. When I use this criteria to sort, desc will put the Gold after Silver, so that it is highest in reverse order. But when I use asc, which should put Gold at the top, instead Gold is after Silver.
This is driving me nuts. I realize it's pretty convoluted, so it's possible no one will actually read to the end. But there has to be a way to do this.