The standard way to display the post in Wordpress is them ordered sequentially one below the other. If we take the look of an example of some web pages, we can see they have not an effective approach. But these days, every site used featured content because they want to make their most popular or point out the piece of content which is important for the visitors.
Here I am providing some examples:
· Mashable
· TechCrunch
· ProBlogger
Improving your theme
Basically, you want to display the some featured post depend on the theme you are using. And it doesn’t support the featured post till you do so. Therefore basic approach is getting that theme that allows you to do so by default. For example, the newsletter which is perfect for all kind of magazines, a home quest which is popular for real estate agents and much more.
Featured post-VS PHP coding
Start from the manual way of enabling a feature post on your blog. It includes some PHP coding not as much.
In beginning create a new category on your website. Here we are naming”featured” to make everything simple and clear.
Whenever someone creates a new post and they want to appear in feature section, the only thing they have to assign to the category. Even if method involves some PHP coding, the end user can use simply.
Here is the difficult part. You have to edit only index.php file of your theme and also add new lines of code according to post.
The exact place where you will put this code is totally up to you and also depends on your design, but the common placement of this code is above the content loop.
Feature post vs plugins
There are three plugins I do like to recommend for enabling featured post on WordPress site:
Simple featured Post widget: this simple widget does 90% of the job. It is a customizable widget. You can also tweak the CSS to match your site. But it supports no fancy features just essential stuff.
Thumbnail: another simple widget. And this can helps you to make your post featured easier. It adds an additional box to your screen that allows you to mark the current post as featured. Apart from that, you can get standard set of features.
Meteor slides: this is a most feature rich plugin. It provides a way to display cool JavaScript slider advertise whatever you wish, not just selected content.
Once you install this plugin, a new content type will create on will create on your blog, form slider you can manage them another type.
