Magento Default Order By select list ignoring my admin settings

I am using Magento 1.4.0.1.

I am trying to get my product listing pages to display products listed by SKU by default. I have SKU appearing in the select list - I added it via the Manage Attributes admin area. I have then set SKU as the Default Sort Option in System > Configuration > Catalog > Product listing sort by.

All of my categories in the admin are set to use Config Settings in the Display Settings tab, and the Default Product Listing Sort by list is greyed out (although it defaults the value shown in the list to Best Value??? - Best Value apparently translates to Position on the front-end in Magento 1.4.0.1??).

Those settings should work, but they don't. I must assume that the template code somewhere is overriding the admin settings, but I have trudged through some places looking for something wrong and found nothing. I might not be looking in 开发者_高级运维the right places of course!

I have also tried specifically setting a category to default to SKU display, and not use the config settings. This didn't change anything either.

Does anyone have an idea of what might be overriding this - and where to find it to resolve it?

Help much appreciated!

Cheers.

Try to see if the default value is overridden somewhere.
It could be:

• in a category view => Manage categories => Display Settings of the desired category;
• in a store view => same where you set the default ordering, selecting a different store wit the dropdown menu (top-left corner of Configuration => Catalog => Frontend);
• in the layout file => this could be in your catalog.xml or in a custom layout update;