Adding a Featured Post to Your WordPress Blog

Adding a Featured Post to Your WordPress Blog

Adding a featured post or breaking information section to your WordPress blog is a common need for many blog owners. Unfortunately, this capability is not built into most WordPress themes or plug-in options . For the themes that have this ability, it normally involves regularly updating the PHP source code of the WordPress theme template file in order to display a featured article of the blog. impNerd provides a Featured Post plug-in that can be used to add this capability to your WordPress blog with minimal PHP modification.

Adding the WordPress Featured Post Plug-in

Step 1 – Download the featured post plug-in from impNerd and install on your WordPress blog.

Step 2 – Activate the plug-in from your WordPress Plug-in manager.

Step 3 – Add the following PHP code to your Main Index Template or index.php of your WordPress template file depending on where you would like the featured post to appear by selecting the “Appearance -> Editor” menu options from the WordPress administrator panel. For adding the featured post to the template this blog is written on (UDP Money Maker) the Featured Post line of code was added after the initial line:

<?php get_header(); ?> (This is the first line of PHP code in the file on my blog, no modification required)

<?php if (is_home()) { if(function_exists(‘featuredposts‘)) featuredposts(); } ?> (This is the line of code that I added to the template on line 2).

Your blog may be setup slightly different, and I recommend making a backup copy of the Index Template before you modify the file.

Step 4 – Now, select the “Featured Posts” plug-in options menu and enter the post ID of the WordPress blog post you intend to feature. To find the post ID of the post you intend to feature, open the post in edit mode and look at the URL in your web browser. The post ID will be a two to four digit number that is at the end of the URL. If you do not see a number then verify you are in edit mode.

Step 5 - Upload the image you intend to display with the featured post to the plugins/featured-posts/images folder on your website. This will require you to FTP the image separately from your normal WordPress updates. Images are not required to be used with the Featured Post plug-in. The recommended size to upload is 233 x 175 pixels, but you can use images of other sizes and they will be scaled.

Selecting an Image to Display With Your Featured Post in WordPress

Step 6 – Choose an image to include with your featured post or no image in the featured post plug-in options page and select the “Save” button. Note that you do not have to use an image for a featured post.

Step 7 – Modify the layout of the Featured Post box by editing the featured-posts.css or featured-posts.php file(s) located in the /plugins/featured-post directory of your WordPress installation. For this blog, I had to delete a Horizontal line that is in the default installation in the featured-post.php file to avoid the line being drawn through the “Read the Story” label of the post. If you just want to change the look and feel of the post, modify the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) in this directory.

Viewing the Featured Post on the Main Page of This Blog

Additional Tools to Use With or Without The Featured Post Plug-in

Changing the Default Number of Posts to Display on Your WordPress Blog

Ok, so I felt dumb with my WordPress blog when I requested other webmasters review this blog on NetBuilders.org and Digital Point forums when most web masters said they liked my format, but it took too long to load. Well, guess what? I had left the default of “Display 10 posts” on my main page turned on! It didn’t matter how many plug-ins I turned off, the blog just loaded slow! So, to reduce this from 10 posts to a lesser number (I’ve started using three + the featured post) do the following steps:

Step 1 - Select the Dashboard tab in the upper left-hand portion of your admin screen.

Menu Configuration Option for Modifying the Number of Posts to Display on Your WordPress Blog

Step 2 – Select the “Reading” menu option on the lower, left-hand portion of the screen.

Step 3 - Change the text field entry next to, “Blog pages show at most” from 10 to the desired number of posts that you desired to display.
Tweaking How Much of Each Post to Display

This one is simple. Instead of displaying the full text of each post, you can insert the “Read More” tag anywhere that you desire in a given post. To do this, select the “Insert More Tag” option in the visual editor of your post. If using the “Read More” method, ensure you pick a consistent point in each post to do so and experiment with what works for your format!

That’s about it. Hopefully you find the Featured Post plug-in and these tips useful and if you have trouble please email or request assistance! If you have other related needs to the featured post plugin, you can find other useful plugins at WPHacks and Yoast.com as well!

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