How can I do nested ordering? I want to put the index of section in order by two fields: featured and startDate. Basically, I want the featured entries to rise to the top of the index, and then within the featured posts I want them to be sorted by startDate field. Below the featured entries, I want the other entries to also be sorted by startDate.

I tried entries.order('featured desc').order('startDate desc') but, as I expected, it simply ordered by startDate because that method executed after ordering by featured.

Is there any way to achieve what I'm tring to do?
This should get you the desired results:

{% for entry in craft.entries.section('yoursection').order('startDate desc, featured desc') %}

    {# Entry Code #}

{% endfor %}


If for any reason that doesn't achieve exactly what it is you are looking for, you could always break it up into multiple loops, 1 for featured, and 1 for not featured. It's not as clean as the above solution but should also solve the issue:

This will use 2 loops, one for the featured and 1 for the not featured, assuming the 'featured' field is a lightswitch.

{% for entry in craft.entries.section('yoursection').search('featured:1').order('startDate desc') %}

    {# Entry Code #}

{% endfor %}


and

{% for entry in craft.entries.section('yoursection').search('featured:not 1').order('startDate desc') %}

    {# Entry Code #}

{% endfor %}