Re-order only widget/seperate page

This module may help - we have addressed a similar use case: https://drupal.org/sandbox/ingaro/2019853

I've turned that sandbox module into a patch. It adds a new field_collection_sorter widget.

Patch #3 works great for me.
It allows users to use node view to add/edit/delete field collections and the node edit to sort them.

Only issue is the titles are numbered items and that makes it difficult to sort, not sure if this is an issue for this patch.

Unlike nodes, field collection items don't have any obvious property to use
as a title, so the label shown in the widget will simply be something like
'Collection 1', Collection 2 etc. This comes from the entity's label()
method and is the same thing that's shown when the 'links to field collection
items' formatter is used.

You can change this for your own field collections where you know what the
fields are and have a means of picking a suitable title. You can implement
the following hook to load the field collection entity and replace the default
label with something more useful:

  /**
   * Implements hook_field_widget_field_collection_sorter_form_alter().
   */
  function mymodule_field_widget_field_collection_sorter_form_alter(&$element, &$form_state, $context) {
    if ($context['field']['field_name'] == 'my_custom_field') {

      // special case for the 'my_custom_field' field:
      // we know that items referenced by this field will have a field called
      // 'my_collection_item_title' which we can use to identify them

      foreach ($context['items'] as $delta => $item) {
        $item_id = $context['items'][$delta]['value'];
        $item = field_collection_item_load($item_id);
        $item_wrapper = entity_metadata_wrapper('field_collection_item', $item);
        $title = $item_wrapper->my_collection_item_title->value();

        $element[$delta]['label'] = array(
          '#markup' => check_plain(),
        );
      }
    }
  }

This problem with the lack of a node title crops up elsewhere see https://drupal.org/node/1335204 & https://drupal.org/node/1674298. We could do something clever to try to guess something meaningful, but I'm not sure it's within the scope of this patch though.

Will give that a go, and thanks for the great patch.

Just in case the field collection item has actually been deleted without updating the host entity, the attached patch avoids a fatal error, which is a bit over-kill for such a situation (which is possible when working with a variety of other modules, such as workbench).

The patch in #8 is 4 years old, but still applies cleanly to 7.x-1.x-dev and is a great improvement to this module. Can someone else review/test before RTBC?