We have a site-collection structure setup of 1 top level site with 5
subsites (no other sites). Each of these are publishing, and will
publish their own news. On top of that, the top level site would like
to feature news from the subsites, but being allowed to specify the
order of display. Our first phase through this is without .net
development.

The solution we're leaning on is using a data view web part to pull
the news, but our issue we've run into is allowing the order to be
manually set. Is there a way to do this with the DVWP? I saw some
information about passing in parameters, but most information I've
found is related to reading parameters from the url query.

Currently how we're working around this is having the news
contributors enter the news information in another list on the top-
level site (providing link to article, title, date, thumbnail etc.)
and adding a sort order column to the list. That way the top-level
site owner can manually set the order, but this results in a lot of
duplicate data entry. Ideally a lookup column could be used to get
some of this duplicate information, but it won't lookup information
across sites.

Is there a way the order can be specified for the data view web part?