[Answered ]-Change Django alphabetical ordering to custom ordering

You could change status to an IntegerField, and define constants for the three states. Then sorting by ‘status’ should do what you want.

PENDING = 1
APPROVED = 2
CANCELED = 3

STATUS_CHOICES = (APPROVED,'Approved'),(PENDING, 'Pending'), (CANCELED, 'Canceled))

Or you could create a StatusChoice model, with a field sort_order. Make Reservation.status a foreign key to the new model, and sort by status__sort_order.

Another option would be to sort in SQL by using the order_by parameter in extra().