You can see that I have recently changed my theme and also included a Featured Post Section, It took a lot of time for me to get it working because of my little knowledge in PHP but with some trial and error I was able get it working.
I’ll show you how to get your featured Post section in your blog.So lets get started
STEP 1 : Create a Category “Featured” for your blog.
STEP 2 : Create a file “featured.php” in the theme folder.
<?php $my_query = new WP_Query(‘category_name=Featured&showposts=1’);
while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();
$do_not_duplicate = $post->ID; ?>
<div id=”feature”>
<img src=”replace with featured post image.jpg“></img>
<h2 class=”post-title”>
<a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>” title=”<?php the_title(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a>
</h2>
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
<?php edit_post_link(__(‘Edit’), ”, ‘ | ‘); ?>
<?php comments_popup_link(__(‘No Comments’), __(‘1 Comment’), __(‘% Comments’)); ?> | <a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>” title=”<?php the_title(); ?>”><?php _e(‘Read full story »’); ?></a>
</div>
<?php endwhile; ?>
STEP 3 : Open ” index.php ”
Generally the first line would be the get_header(), if you want your Featured Post Section be right after the header , place this line right after that
<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/featured.php’); ?>
STEP 4 : Find this line
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post();?>
in the same index.php and place this next line right after the above line
<?php if( $post->ID == $do_not_duplicate ) continue; update_post_caches($posts); ?>
This does not allow the post to repeat itself in the regular posts below the featured posts thereby eliminating duplicates.
STEP 5: A bit of CSS , add this in your style.css
#feature{
width: 800px;
height: 132px;
float: left;
padding:20px 20px 20px 20px;
font-size:12px;
line-height:16px;
}
#feature img {
float: right; margin: 3px 5px 10px 0; backgroundr:#FFFFFF;
}
Hope this helps you get the Featured Posts up and running in your blog.
Another thing is that for the excerpt to be clean you need to explicitly give an excerpt to the Excerpt Block in your WordPress Advanced Options in the Write Post Admin . The excerpt that you give in the excerpt is displayed on the Homepage.
NOTE : For the Featured post to work you need at least 1 post in your Featured Category.
For quite sometime now, I have been wanting to do this. Now it will help me. I have bookmarked this.
@Joel Thomas: Feels nice that It helps you.
Wow this is just awesome 🙂 I will give a try for this one asap on my blog. Will need to take care about the coding changes i do on my theme because its already heavily customized!
That is a cool application. There is a section on my theme, which shows featured post, but I never tried to understand the code behind it.
Stumbling.
@Silki: Thanks for droping by my blog and thanks for the stumble.
Hey you helped me out with this one! Never knew how this could be done ..
Hi!
Great, just what I wanted.
But what if I wanted 3 or 4 different featured posts sections? Perhaps one above the usual loop and one beneath it. Do I just copy and paste the code and changing the category name?
Best regards
Jonas
Hi Jonas, you can try that out that should work.
@Avinash: Great! I´ll try that. Just worrying to crash stuff. 🙂
@Jonas you could try that on your local WP Installation before trying it on your live site.
The exact post that i needed. Thanks Dude!
I want the plugin to fetch the image from the post automatically.
and at least five featured post must be there on the page.
can you help me please.
Thanks
shouldn’t it be featured.php instead of welcome.php on TEMPLATEPATH thing?
Your right Shawn, it should be featured.php thanks again.I’ve also corrected the post to the same.
Hi Sanjaya, make sure you have pear installed in xampp.., try opening php.ini file which you can find in the XAMPP Folder and look for inclide_path for PEAR in the Paths and Directories Section which should be pointing towards the pear folder .. check out this http://www.apachefriends.org/f/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=32213&start=0&view=print for some more help ..
I dont think you have its still showing welcome.php
Thanks for the headsup.. I edited the post .. you can check it now..
Hey nice tutorial to display featured posts, I just found featured post tutorial, its like a news vertical ticker,
just check out
http://webstutorial.com/wordpress-make-featured-post-jquery-ticker-wordpress-make-featured-posts/content-management-system-cms
This featured post can show either title or title with excerpt
Really Thank You for sharing such a useful tutorial. From many days I was searching for a easy tutorail for adding featured posts to my blog and today I found here on your blog 🙂