Zotero is coded in Javascript. The GUI part would not be the biggest problem here in terms of coding effort. To get the ordering to synchronize with Zotero server would be the hardest part.

I personally consider this nice to have feature, but not very important.

Hi mornkko, I think able to drag reorder subcollections is very helpful if I want to use collection as a kind of outline of my writing.

If it is hard. Then to enable 'batch rename' collection and sub collection will also helps a lot. I mean some thing like that: with a click of a button your collection struct will shows up in a doc like outliner. Then you can rename them,shift them to lower or uper level and so on. Then wenn you save that outline, they will all turn to a sturcture of collection and sub-collection with the same effect of you do the rename by hand.

You can set your collection order by making the first character(s) numerals. Not ideal, perhaps, but it works for me to keep certain collections at the top of the column.

I vote for "unsorted" collections, too.
Numbering all entries is not only hard work. It looks ugly and it is a pita to add new entries "in the middle". Reminds me in the "Goto Renumber" problem from my "Basic" times (TRS-80).

When the sorting helps with syncing, _Zotero_ could add the numbers internally.

Well, i'm new to Zotero. I turned some of my Firefox bookmark folders into Zotero collections - and everything turned into chaos, because of the sorting.
I could cry.
Wish i had time to contribute instead of moaning. It is a miracle to me how people can work this way. Maybe _everybody_ is "numbering"?

And it does not work, anyway.
Imagine i take the work and number all the dozens of entries in a collection. I even take the pain and do several passes, so everything is equidistant. Everything looks ordered (not sorted).

Now i want to link some of the entries into other collections - bummer.

As suggested above, I have 3 collections that I use frequently so I added numbers to each name. I have a difficult effort imagining the case for all collections' locations to be under user control and I'm curious about your need for this. (My job is related to organizing information, so I'm truly interested in why you have this need.)

Have you tried using sub-collections? This is the way I keep related collections together.

And... any news on that feature? ;)

I want to organize my collections myself, alphabetical ordering is not ideal.
numbering takes a lot of time and exactly because I need to reorganize things constantly it is useless.

nowhere. Zotero takes user input very seriously, but development is not a democracy -- there's no such thing as voting for a feature.

I just want to +1 to this feature request.

I already use numbers, underscores, etc. to prefix my collections with, but it gets pretty tedious. Also I use a lot of emoji (colored circles, stack of books, star, etc.) to visually differentiate my collections and subcollections, and they sort in a meaningless order, so it's kind of a mess.

It would seriously big a big help for my organization if I could simply drag collections and subcollections in my desired order.

I'm a programmer and do appreciate that syncing ordering changes is not trivial. But also, because there's no data loss ever involved, I would hope that a fairly simple data model would be fine -- it's not the end of the world if a "merge conflict" results in an ordering that was different from both originals.

I'd love to see this feature.

Currently I have to use some weird numbering scheme to order them and it's not pleasing to see and takes space. With this feature we'll be able to, for example, put the important collections at the top, or sort the collections in a logical order.

This feature may not look fancy but I think it's kind of a fundamental feature and immensely useful.

+1 to this request. I like using my folders as an outline, and it's really frustrating to not be able to drag and drop. I've considered numbering, as others have mentioned, but frankly I'm discouraged by even the prospect of constantly having to renumber, since I'm shifting things around pretty frequently. While it's true that this feature is a "nice to have" in that it's not as important as the core citation functionality, it would be super useful and actually pretty fundamental to many people's workflow if introduced.

https://www.zotero.org/support/forum_guidelines#etiquette

I know this is a request thread but for those who are struggling to organize their collections, I would like to share my organizing workflow below.

I am using native sorting via numbers, dots and dashes to work around this issue. It might look cumbersome at first but I find organizing within a framework rather than arbitrary sequencing is highly functional in retrieving the desired subcollection or paper.

I keep an inbox collection and sub-collections for tagging, planning, keeping track of my readings and processing of literature generally. I find it highly useful to select and find articles I want to read.

I keep an archive collection with dedicated sub-collections for every subject that I am interested in. Every item is placed in the archive before they get out of the inbox.

I create a collection for each project and sub-collections for each stage of the project. These items also get archived in their respective sub-collections before they leave the inbox of the project.

I also highly recommend using tags extensively.
Numbered tags can be utilized for categorizing in terms of process: toread, reading, read, processing, processed, tobereviewed, tobearchived, archived, projectname, projectnameused (last two are interchangeable for the stage of the current project)
Although nested tags are not available natively, Ethereal Style plugin offers an option. I prefer level 1 tags, since organizing tag hierarchies via tags pane is cumbersome in my experience.