I think the issue is the results page is pulling data from Problem Vehicles so there’s no way to get it to order by Manufacturer.

Ah, of course. It is ordering by the value in the list, and not the label. That, if you have the PHP skills, can be fixed. You would need to return the sort order settings in the Posts tab back to default, and instead see if you can use this filter:

https://searchandfilter.com/documentation/action-filter-reference/#edit-query-arguments

To somehow set that sort order, but I am not sure how. If you want, I can ask our developer, Ross?

Hi Keith

I’ve had a quick look at this.

The issue is, a make or a model is only a numeric value in the post meta (the post ID), so any kind of sorting related to this post meta doesn’t really work, logically.

I’ve had a look through ACF forums for this sort of thing and they don’t provide a simple solution:
https://support.advancedcustomfields.com/forums/topic/orderby-post-object-title-not-post_id/

However there is this one:
https://support.advancedcustomfields.com/forums/topic/ordering-by-custom-field-of-relationship-field-object/

But again its very complicated.

Essentially, you need to get all the posts from the relationship field, order them alphabetically, store their IDs in the correct order, and then sort our results using that order – its would be rather complex and probably not very efficient (in terms of amount of processing taken to achieve that affect)

We do have a filter to allow custom ordre of results in this way – so if you want to go down that road I can share (its not listed in our docs yet because we had planned to change the name)

Thanks