Let the user choose the order of the articles in the theme options panel

Hello,

I am creating a new Newsletter theme and I would like to let the user decide in which order the articles should be shown in the Newsletter. My Newsletter is divided by categories, some categories have 2 articles and other more.

To do so I decided to create a select menu for each item of the Newsletter.
I added a new function in controls.php to the NewsletterControls class :

    /** Creates a select menu with all posts from a specified category.
     */
    function category_posts($name = 'category_posts', $categoryid) {
        $list = array();
        $category_posts = get_posts(array('category' => $categoryid));
        foreach ($category_posts as &$category_post) {
            $list[$category_post->ID] = $category_post->post_title;
        }

        $this->select($name, $list);
    }

Then in my theme-options.php I add :

Article 1: <?php $controls->category_posts('theme_category_post1', 4); ?>

I can also add several select menus for different categories :

Article 1 for category 4: <?php $controls->category_posts('theme_category_post1', 4); ?>
Article 1 for category 5: <?php $controls->category_posts('theme_category_post2', 5); ?>
Article 2 for category 5: <?php $controls->category_posts('theme_category_post3', 5); ?>

This solution actually work but I don’t know if it is the best way to do so and I would like to have your suggestion.

Also, is there a way to implement this solution without losing the code when I will update the plugin?

Thanks a lot!