Featured Item Metabox
I found I constantly needed a way for clients to mark a post as something they wanted to feature and I’ve never found sticky posts particularly inuitive and the UI is pretty hidden for new users. The simplest solution was a checkbox in prominently located metabox. Please note that this plugin, by it
I found I constantly needed a way for clients to mark a post as something they wanted to feature and I’ve never found sticky posts particularly inuitive and the UI is pretty hidden for new users. The simplest solution was a checkbox in prominently located metabox.
Please note that this plugin, by itself, will not change how your posts are displayed. It just gives the UI to users and a meta key to theme developers to query for.
Usage
This plugin simply adds a _featured meta key to every post with a value of yes for featured items and no for everything else. Actual display of the featured items is entirely up to the theme developer, but an example ( place in your template where you’d like to display a list of featured “Portfolios”) might be as follows:
// params for our query $args = array( 'post_type' => 'portfolio', 'posts_per_page' => 5, 'meta_key' => '_featured', 'meta_value' => 'yes' ); // The Query $featured_portfolios = new WP_Query( $args ); // The Loop if ( $featured_portfolios ) : echo '<ul class="featured">'; while ( $featured_portfolios->have_posts() ) : $featured_portfolios->the_post(); echo '<li>' . get_the_title() . '</li>'; endwhile; echo '</ul>'; else : echo 'No featured portfolios found.'; endif; /* Restore original Post Data * NB: Because we are using new WP_Query we aren't stomping on the * original $wp_query and it does not need to be reset. */ wp_reset_postdata();
Multiple queries per page load can slow down your site so it is worthwhile to take advantage of the Transients API , so an alternate usage would be:
// Get any existing copy of our transient data if ( false === ( $featured_portfolios = get_transient( 'featured_portfolios' ) ) ) { // It wasn't there, so regenerate the data and save the transient // params for our query $args = array( 'post_type' => 'portfolio', 'posts_per_page' => 5, 'meta_key' => '_featured', 'meta_value' => 'yes' ); // The Query $featured_portfolios = new WP_Query( $args ); // store the transient set_transient( 'featured_portfolios', $featured_portfolios ); } // Use the data like you would have normally... // The Loop if ( $featured_portfolios ) : echo '<ul class="featured">'; while ( $featured_portfolios->have_posts() ) : $featured_portfolios->the_post(); echo '<li>' . get_the_title() . '</li>'; endwhile; echo '</ul>'; else : echo 'No featured portfolios found.'; endif; /* Restore original Post Data * NB: Because we are using new WP_Query we aren't stomping on the * original $wp_query and it does not need to be reset. */ wp_reset_postdata();
Then to ensure that your featured posts list is updated, add a function to your theme’s functions.php to delete the transient when a portfolio (in this example) post type is saved.
