Sorting articles on the front end on-the-fly in Joomla 1.6/1.7

Is there a way, through the use of querystring parameters or something else, to allow visitors of a Joomla site to sort the articles on the page dynamically? For example, the front page of our site currently sorts by default in date order descending. I would like to allow visitors to select to view them sorted by author name instead, or possibly by popularity. I开发者_运维问答 know that pages can be created with these sort preferences "hard coded" into the menu, but I would rather just allow this on the whole page without creating separate menu items.

Is this doable directly, or through a component or plugin?

Joomla 1.5 allows:

index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=33&Itemid=8
&layout=your_own_layout
&filter_order=a.ordering
&limit=999
&filter_order_Dir=asc

Ie. pretty much anything that is in the menu configuration xml for blog category.

Try this, I don't see why this functionality would have been removed.

This may be too late - but if anyone else is looking for a solution:

http://docs.joomla.org/Adding_sortable_columns_to_a_table_in_a_component