On phpRiot today, they've posted a new tutorial showing how to create sortable lists with Ajax and PHP.
This article covers the implementation of a system that lets you easily define the order of such a list.
You might have been in a situation before where you had a list of items in your database that needed to be output in a specific order. These items could be anything: perhaps a listing of your favourite movies or your favourite books. For whatever reason, you want them ordered in a custom way that can't be determined automatically (such as alphabetical).
They use the example of a movie listing to fill out the data items. They show you both sides of the setup - using Prototype and Scriptaculous to create effects/handle the Ajax, PHP to interface with the database, and a little CSS to make it all look nice. The end result is a list that saves its status from page load to page load, and can be modified just a simple click and drag.