Important note: In order to avoid confusion, the sort extensions are disabled by default. You can enable them on the new "Sort" page in the Global Settings. Warning: After you enable the new sort functions, your previous folder sort settings will get lost successively as the WPS activates folders. Unfortunately, this is inevitable, because IBM has barely documented at all how the WPS sort functions are working internally. As a result, you'll have to reconfigure the sort settings for certain folders (which will be explained below).

The new XFolder sort features are:

• Finally, there are global sort settings, which previously did not exist in the WPS. While it was possible to set a number of folder settings globally, until now sorting could only be influenced for each individual folder, which was quite annoying. XFolder introduces a "Sort" page to the "System" object for global sort settings, which can be overridden individually for each folder.
  
• XFolder also gets rid of some of the strange sort settings which nobody used anyway, such as the "sort class". (This setting did not make much sense, because WPFolder is the only class which introduces meaningful sort criteria anyway.)
  
• There is a new item in the "Sort" context submenu for enabling the "Always maintain sort order" setting quickly.

  
  

• You can quickly change the default sort criterion for a certain folder by opening the "Sort" context submenu and holding down the "Shift" key while selecting a sort criterion.
  
• Most importantly, XFolder introduces three new options to the "Sort" menu of every folder, which are "Sort by object class", "Sort by extension" and "Sort folders first":
  
  1. The "Sort by object class" feature sorts the folder content according to the classes of the contained objects, as they are visible in the third column of a folder's Details view.
     
  2. The "Sort by extension" option sorts the folder contents by file name extension, i.e. the characters after the last dot in the object title. For example, ".BMP" files would be sorted before ".HTM", ".HTML" and ".ICO" files, in this order. If two files have the same extension, they are sorted alphabetically within their extension group. Although file extensions make sense mostly for file-system objects, abstract objects are sorted in this way too.
     
  3. The "Sort folders first" sorts the folder alphabetically, but puts all folder objects on top of the list. Shadows of folders are treated just like regular folders.