Ordering by featured filters instead

[TeeJay.net]

The great ordering function can sort/order products by any fields you choose. That's okay and it works well - with one exception.
If you set (on the FrontEnd) that you want to order your products by "featured" property, it feels either buggy or poorly designed.

What happens after selecting "order by featured"

• only your featured products are displayed, those that are not featured are not shown at all without any message like "no featured products are in this category"
• if there are no featured products in the category, the select box with <?php echo $this->orderByList['orderby']; ?> disappears and you can't even switch back to the default order
• in case there are featured products, their order is random

What I would suppose to happen after selecting "order by featured"

• All the products would stay displayed, just the featured ones would be listed first (therefore ORDERING, not FILTERING)

I guess you understand my thoughts. The current behavior would make sense in case it was just a checkbox next to sorting, but definitely not part of the sorting select box as it doesn't sort anything, it filters products. Sorting should never hide any products in my opinion.

Thanks for your opinions about this .



(I know this is a duplicate of this topic, but that's two years old and I wanted to express myself clearly.)