Add “Featured Posts” to your Thematic child theme

Featured Posts for Thematic

Featured posts are common in Wordpress magazine themes. They let you promote hot topics and bring your best articles right in front of your users.

First thing we need to do is create a thematic child theme. This way we won’t make direct changes to Thematic.

The featured posts will be inserted on the home page before the rest of the articles. We’ll display the latest 3 posts which are tagged ‘featured’.

We now have to add the code inside of functions.php file of your child theme (don’t forget the <?php opening tag and the ?> ending tag).

function featured_posts(){

		$my_query = new WP_Query('tag=featured&showposts=3');

		echo '<ul id="featured-posts">';
		$feat_class = array();

		while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();
				$feat_class = array();
				// Category for the post queried
				foreach ( (array) get_the_category() as $cat )
					$feat_class[] = 'category-' . $cat->slug;
					$feat_class = join(" ", $feat_class);
				?>
				<li id="featured-<?php the_ID(); ?>" class="<?php echo $feat_class; ?>">
					<?php
						$posttitle = '<h4><a href="';
						$posttitle .= get_permalink();
						$posttitle .= '" title="';
						$posttitle .= __('Permalink to ', 'thematic') . the_title_attribute('echo=0');
						$posttitle .= '" rel="bookmark">';
						$posttitle .= get_the_title();
						$posttitle .= "</a></h4>\n";
						echo $posttitle;

						the_excerpt();
					?>

				</li><!-- .post -->
		<?php
		endwhile;
		echo '</ul>';
}
add_action('thematic_above_indexloop','featured_posts');

The first line $my_query = new WP_Query(‘tag=featured&showposts=3′); defines the name of the tag that targets your posts (you can have any tag name there) and the number of featured articles (three in this case).

Right now it’s just a list of posts so a bit of css styling is in order to make it look attractive to your visitors. Add this css to your style.css file inside the Child Theme.

ul#featured-posts {
    float: left;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0 0 15px 0;
    list-style: none;
    color: #111;
    font-size: 11px;
    line-height:14px;
    font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
}
#featured-posts li {
    float: left;
    width: 135px;
    padding: 12px 10px 10px 10px;
    margin-right: 15px;
    min-height: 260px;
    background:#f1f1f1;
    border:3px double #ccc;
}

#featured-posts li p {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
}

#featured-posts li:hover {
    background:#fff;
}
#featured-posts li h4 a {
    font-family:Georgia, Times, sans-serif;
    font-size: 12px;
    line-height: 13px;
    display: block;
    padding: 5px 1px;
    color: #111;
    font-weight: bold;
}

I hope you find it useful and don’t hesitate to post in the comments were you’ve used this.

Further Reading:

1. Street Wordpress Theme
2. Installing Wordpress Child Themes and Customizing the Byty Theme
3. Exclude posts from WordPress Navigation in Thematic
4. Early Morning Child Theme
5. WP Greet Box, my Design and Thematic – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly