There is no need for a certain order from a technical point of view because DPL applies your changes in an order that probably differs from the one you used when you made your changes.
When I customize images, my first steps are
- color rendering
- white balance
Everything else follows according to what I intend to make out of that shot.
I don’t particularly care for sharpness (no image is in a museum because it is sharp) and the same goes for noise reduction, again depending on what I intend to make out of that shot.
Check out this to see what I mean. You can download the original files at the upper end of the post and my sidecars, they were written by the Mac version of DPL4.
Update: Check out this page for another sequence of developing steps.