Paginate v2 issues

I have 2 problems:

  1. I would like to sort my blog by something other than post.date (a field I’ve created called startDate.
  • I have installed jekyll-paginate-v2
  • after turning paginate: true on in my _config.yml, my blog display layout, and the blog list page itself, my posts list again as they did with paginate v1
  • they do not, however sort on my selected field as indicated in my layout page, and blog list page
  • debug indicates that it is at least attempting to sort on my selected field
  • I have tried sorting on other (alphabetic) fields and those work as you’d expect
  • my starDate are in yyyy-mm-dd format, which as far as I can tell from reading around is the ISO 8601 correct format for sorting (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30933741/jekyll-cant-sort-collection-by-date)
  • oddly enough, my page dates are in “Tue Feb 5 14:37:49 PST 2019” format and it has no problems sorting on that
  • do I need to convert all my startDates, and if so to what format?
  1. I have a mixed format blog (regular post, event post, report post), I can list them separately, but I like listing them together. Only the event posts have startDates, so this is not a nested field situation. I would like to sort on startDates (if they exist) and post.date if they don’t. Is there a way to do this?