Sorting data in MySQL can be really easy if you're just trying to sort alphabetically or numerically. All you have to do is slap in the ORDER BY clause and list out the columns in order of importance. For example:

SELECT * FROM `animals` ORDER BY `color` DESC,`name`

But, what if you want to do something more complicated? Like sorting the animals by the lightness of their color? That's where ORDER BY FIELD can come in handy. You can use it to specify the exact order the values should be sorted by. Check this out:

SELECT * FROM `animals` ORDER BY FIELD(`color`,'light blue','blue','dark blue'),`name`

Still, that doesn't quite cover all the bases. What if you want to show all the light blue and blue animals first (sorted by name) followed by all the dark blue animals? You could do two separate queries and then UNION them together, but that creates it's own set of issues... Or you can try this cool trick involving CASE that I figured out the other day:

SELECT *,CASE WHEN `color` IN ('light blue','blue') THEN '1' WHEN `color` ='dark blue' THEN '2' END AS `customsort` FROM `animals` ORDER BY `customsort`,`name`

Using the CASE statement, you create a temporary column that you can then sort by. Of course, this example is really simple but you can get much more complex with the queries. Hope this helps save you some time. And, if you have any similar tricks, please paste them in the comments below.