How to get the sort criterion in a general loop?

Question

WordPress

Good afternoon
I was given the task of displaying products in the store in a certain order. And in each category of goods the procedure is different. For example: There is a category of sportswear and it contains such products as T-shirts, T-shirts, gloves, shorts. The task is to display on the page of this category first all the T-shirts, then all the shorts, then the rest. But these same products are also in other categories, and in other categories, T-shirts will no longer be in the first place.
After a lot of googling, I decided that the most suitable option is to do it as described here .
I will quote

This is not difficult to do, but requires knowledge of php at least. The point is to change the archive-product.php template. You need to change the loop in this template and disable wc_get_template_part(). It is necessary not to display content in the while loop, but to form an associative array. Roughly speaking, we have a list of all goods (records). In the loop, we go through all the products. Each item has a label. And write to the array, where the cell key is just the product label. As a result, the array will look like array('metka_tovara1' => array('array of products'), 'metka_tovara2' => array('array of products2'), 'metka_tovara3' => array('array of products3')). Products array stores products. For each product there is a list of required fields for output - link, image, title, description, prices, etc..
This method will not affect the standard work of woocommerce and the filter. Perhaps it is written difficult, but in more detail - it is to write the code.

And all this works, but now the usual sorting (by price, or any other) is not performed, because. I redefine the position of the goods in the code.
It turns out that my code (which overrides the positions of the products) should only be executed when the default sort is selected
. Now the QUESTION: How do I, when I am in the main output loop of the products or before it, to find out if the default sort (default) or user select something?
ps/ Maybe I'm going in the wrong direction, then please correct me and tell me how to organize this.
Thanks

Answer 1

And now the QUESTION: How do I, when I am in the main cycle for displaying products or before it, find out if the sorting was default (default) or the user selected something?
- 1 option, see $_REQUEST. When sorting is used, there is something there.
- Option 2 to look at global wp_query with different sorting, find out what changes there.
Here you need to estimate how many products in each category and how many categories. I will suggest the easiest way to implement it through custom fields. For each product card, you need to create a custom field called 'order_$term_id'. Those. depending on the number of headings in which the product is located, there will be a number of such fields. You can write a script that will create these fields itself depending on the number of selected categories. In these fields you need to put down the number of positions. For example, T-shirts will have a number from 0 to 100, shorts will have a number from 100 to 200, and so on. It's not important here and you have to do it right. You can put the same number for all shorts or a different one, depending on whether you need to sort additionally within the group of shorts.
It turns out that all category cards with id 16 will have a custom field order_16 with values ​​inside. It is important that at least 0 is there.
Well, the last step is to intercept the wp_query request while in the category and change the sorting

$args = array(
   'meta_key' => 'order_16',
   'orderby' => 'meta_value_num',
   'order' => 'ASC',
 );

add_action( 'pre_get_posts', 'modify_main_query' );
function filters_modify_main_query( $query ) {

  return $query;
}

You need to do this, unless, of course, there is nothing in $_REQUEST in the sort cells.