Not all posts are created equal. In fact, some posts are of much importance to the subject of your blog and you, as the author, may wish to display those posts with more prominence. As products of this desire, the OnePress framework includes a number of widgets that focus on the presentation of featured posts. By using some simple tagging logic and widget placement, posts can appear throughout your site as featured posts and be given their proper place in the spotlight.
The tag logic is simple–posts tagged “feature” appear in the Featured Posts Carousel and posts tagged “featurette” appear in the Featurette Tabs widget. The rest is auto-magical. But I would like to explain, in today’s tip, the underlying logic behind that widget magic.
Obviously, when you have a post that you would like to have displayed as features, it makes sense to tag them both “feature” and “featurette.” The differentiation between the tags exists as you may not want some posts to be shown in the large feature carousel and, by that same reasoning, some don’t need to be displayed in the featurette tabs. However, a post with either of these tags, is considered a “featured” post.
All featured posts in OnePress are registered as such internally. As you place widgets around your site and assign certain tags to those widgets, you may encounter situations in which duplicate content could exist. For instance, your latest featured post is tagged “feature,” which should cause it to display in the carousel on a page, and is also tagged “featurette,” causing it to display in the tabs widget on that same page. However, the OnePress featured post logic circumvents this issue through its awareness of the widgets that exist on any given page and by only allowing a featured post to display once.
Once a post has been added to a featured post widget in the main column, it will not be available to be displayed elsewhere.
As your site is rendered through OnePress, each featured post is registered as it is added to a widget. The rendering begins with the “main” column. As widgets are rendered in their sequential order, posts that are used in those widgets are made unavailable to the widgets that follow.
Featured posts are added to the widget in reverse chronological order. That is, newer posts will take priority and bump older posts. This in turn, cause an aging effect for featured posts. As they get older, they will move to widgets further down the main column or into the sidebars. Newer posts will always receive the most exposure.
Immune to all of the featured post logic is the Content Body widget. This widget will always take into account the WordPress loop and does not filter out those posts used by widgets.
