Maya Deformers Part 1: Rearranging Deformers

In order for deformers to be user-friendly you need to be able to add, remove, rearrange, combine, and edit your deformers.  Here, we'll be covering the concept of "rearranging" your deformers. 

The first thing we'll need is an object (a cylinder, in this case) that has more than one deformer already on it. Let's first create a cylinder with a few extra divisions.

Maya Main Menu Bar > Create > Polygon Primitives > Cylinder (option box)

This window will pop-up.  Enter the following values.

Then, we'll need to add a few deformers to the cylinder: Bend, Flare, and Sine.

When a deformer shows up in the Channel Box, it starts at the bottom and goes to the top.  The deformer-handles that show up in the Outliner window show up top-to-bottom.

Now you can see that we have a bend, flare, and sine deformer on the cylider (in that order).

In the Node Editor, the deformers show up with the first deformer you've added on the left and the last deformer on the right.  So, our history, in the Node Editor, will go left-to-right.

Order of Operations flow out of the IntermediateObject
mesh into the first deformer, and so on.
Calculating deformation all the way till the final outputMesh
object that you can see in the panelView.

Now, lets begin to rearrange the deformers.

Let's have a look at our "List of input operations" for pCylinder1.

A menu will show up when you click on that button. 

Choose the "All Inputs..." menuItem.

(side-note: alternatively, you can right-click on your mesh 

in the panelView to get the "List of input operations" window to show up)

This window should show up.  We can use this window to rearrange our deformers.  
You can see our deformers listed below.