[wp-hackers] Handling the featured tags

[Mike Little]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 12:31 PM, Haluk Karamete <halukkaramete at gmail.com>wrote:

> From time to time, I feature posts from the archives. Sometimes, I
> need to feature items 2 3 years back.
>
> In order to feature such posts, I simply categorized them into the
> `featured` category and once I am done featuring them, I unchecked
> them from the `featured` cat so I can have the room to feature new
> ones.
>
> This approach has multiple drawbacks.
>
> Firstly, I cannot simply go pick a post and then categorize it under
> `featured` and expect it to be appear on my `featured` zone!. I MUST
> UNCHECK AT LEAST ONE OF THE EXISTING FEATURED POSTS. Why? Well, if I
> got room to display 5 featured items, and I happen to just feature a
> 6th one. which 5 is to show in there?
>
> Secondly, due to the unchecking, I can never build an archive of 'once
> featured' or 'at least once featured' list of posts.
>
> It seems to me that WordPress make a one heck of an assumption that
> featured posts come from the latest posts! So, As you bring new posts
> in it, you can simply keep on checking them into the `featured` posts,
> and WP will nicely show them in your `featured items zone` in the
> chronological order. This obviously kicks the 6th one out of the view,
> keeping the latest 5 in the zone.
>
> But, what if you pick one old post (from say 3 mts ago && you want
> that to appear in that very same zone? Change the post date?
>
> Let me quickly note here that the Sticky posts feature of WP won't
> help here neither, cause they too require the maintenance of
> 'unsticking'. Sticks posts may help with the situation for one Zs and
> two Zs but if you constantly feature items from the past, it won't
> help at all.
>
> I wish there was a special category, called FEATURED with an option to
> change the base name  whereby WP manages the featured items using a a
> different date based criteria.
>
> So, Everytime an item is checked into that special `featured` WP
> category, WP  keeps track of the date of this action into a database
> field, called `last featured date` or something like that and when it
> displays the items in the `featured` cat ( and all of its sub cats ),
> it simply sort posts  using that date - instead of the post_created
> date!
>
> My question to you is that if there are slick solutions out there to
> address this problem?
>


I've not heard of such a plugin, but you've just described a plugin that
should only take a couple of hours for an experienced plugin writer to
create.


Mike
-- 
Mike Little
http://zed1.com/