I'm having some trouble figuring out the best/Djangoic way to do this. I'm creating something like an interactive textbook. It has modules, which are more or less like chapters. Each module page needs to list the topics in that module, grouped into sections.

My question is how I can ensure that they list in the correct order in the template? Specifically:

1) How to ensure the sections appear in the correct order? 2) How to ensure the topics appear in the correct order in the section?

I imagine I could add a field to each model purely for the sake of ordering, but the problem with that is that a topic might appear in different modules, and in whatever section they are in there they would again have to be ordered somehow.

I would probably give up and do it all manually were it not for the fact that I need to have the Topic as object in the template (or view) so I can mark it up according to how the user has labeled it.

So I suppose my question is really to do with whether I should create the contents pages manually, or whether there is a way of ordering the query results in a way I haven't thought of. Thanks for your help!