Featured Content For WordPress

It’s surprisingly easy to build a neat little featured content area in WordPress, using a custom query to grab a couple of posts from a selected category, tag or even custom field. In this post we’ll find out how to build a simple featured content area for your blog, rather like the one I recently added to WPShout:

Choose your posts

First thing you need to do is choose which posts you want to have in your featured area. For argument’s sake, I’m going to use a category “featured”. We’re going to be building something like what’s currently on WPShout: no fancy jQuery, just something smart and functional that clearly shows off a couple of posts. Because we’re showing only three posts, we’re not going to do the usual and display the three most recent posts, but be bold and randomly pick three posts out of our category “featured”. This requires a custom query looking something like this:

<?php
    $featured = new WP_Query();
    $featured->query('posts_per_page=3&category_name=Featured&orderby=rand');
?>
<?php while ($featured->have_posts()) : $featured->the_post(); ?>

<?php endwhile; ?>

Displaying posts

Now that we’ve got our posts, we need to display them. We’ll wrap them in a div with the titles wrapped in H2s and linked up, followed by the post’s excerpt. That’ll all end up something like this:

<div class="featured-post">
	<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
	<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
</div><!-- .featured-post -->

Of course, we’ll then need to sandwich that in our query, so we end up with the following: