Magento currently does not sort category products and any product listing for that matter by Newest (highest entity_id). Since my store works best when showing fresh products we felt it necessary to have our Magento installation sort by newest product first (descending) so that just by clicking through categories, users would be seeing the latest and greatest products. Now, Magento does allow you to manually rank per product from the Catalog -> Manage Categories -> Category Products screen, but changing our product listings to show latest products first was our goal.

I was able to change my Magento product listings to show newest items first by following the comments in this post within the Magento Forum:

The two important pieces are here:

We need things sorted by product entered date since my industry is very front-line driven. So I wen and changed things to this:

$this->_availableOrder = array(
‘entity_id’ => $this->__(’Newest’),
‘name’ => $this->__(’Name’),
‘price’ => $this->__(’Price’)
);

And here:

Figured it out: in the same toolbar.php file, around lines 101-110, change this:

public function getCurrentDirection()
{
if ($dir = (string) $this->getRequest()->getParam($this->getDirectionVarName())) {
$dir = strtolower($dir);
if (in_array($dir, array(’desc’, ‘asc’))) {
return $dir;
}
}
return ‘asc’;
}

To this:

public function getCurrentDirection()
{
if ($dir = (string) $this->getRequest()->getParam($this->getDirectionVarName())) {
$dir = strtolower($dir);
if (in_array($dir, array(’desc’, ‘asc’))) {
return $dir;
}
}
return ‘desc’;
}

Along with your ‘newest’ entity_id it works like a charm!

That allowed me to have my Magento store sort by newest product first.

Now, there will be an issue when updating so hopefully they’ll be able to add default sort ordering to the administrative suite in the upcoming versions.