Featured Category Wordpress Plugin

Featured Category WordPress Plugin

Find a bug?

If you believe you have found a bug, please open a ticket here. This will allow me to track the issue as a single issue and others to comment and give feedback.

I’m finding it difficult to discern user error from bug from configuration differences among different installations. All of this will lead to a quicker turn around for reported issues. Isn’t that cool?

Official WordPress Link

Featured Category 1.0.2.1 for WordPress 2.7.1

About a month ago I began searching for a plugin I just knew existed. I needed a plugin that would allow me to select a category, a number of posts, and display a neatly formatted list of the applicable posts from that category.

For the site in question, I needed to list recent posts from a “Projects” category. I imagined that there would be at minimum a plugin for posting news items that I could modify. I settled with using The_Loop. At the time I made a mental note “I need to turn this into a plugin.”

Which brings us to Featured Category, my first WordPress Plugin. (Be gentle!)

I tried to follow the WordPress API as closely as possible.

Once you activate the plugin, , simply load it’s settings page and choose the category, the title or “heading” and the number of posts you wish to display.

If the style is not to your liking, simply modify featcat_style.css in the plugin directory. I have included entries for implemented and unimplemented portions to speed things up.

An example from this site. (See home page)

A screenshot from the settings page.

This plugin makes displaying posts from a specific category simple.

Please contact me with any questions. Feel free to post a comment below.

Any feedback will be appreciated.

Updates 10.9.2008

Thanks to user feedback I fixed/modified the following things in version 1.0.1:

Settings page now sets the category drop down box selection when you return to the page.
It shouldn’t run in sidebar widgets anymore.*

*Assuming the sidebar loads after the post…if this isn’t the case on some themes, I’ll have to do more thinking.

Updates 10.11.2008

Thanks to feedback from Raju, I have fixed the following issue:

Path to CSS file was broken in wordpress version of the download. This is because wordpress named the folder differently than I expected.

Updates 5.6.2009
Version 1.0.2.1

Fixed security issue. Only administrators can access admin pages now.
Deleted trailing spaces/empty lines in plugin file that were causing issues with WP Super Cache.

Download it now…
Featured Category 1.0.2 for WordPress 2.7.1

featured category, php, plugins, wordpress

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 5th, 2008 and is filed under Code. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

#1 by Raju at October 6th, 2008

hi,
nice plugin this. but can you please show a demo?

Reply Quote

#2 by clifgriffin at October 6th, 2008

http://clifgriffin.com has it implemented.

Or is that not what you mean?

#3 by Raju at October 6th, 2008

ooppss.. I implemented in my blog as well chk it out!!

http://www.techpp.com

#4 by clifgriffin at October 6th, 2008

Excellent, I’m glad you found it useful.

Do you have any suggestions for improvements?

#5 by techiebiox at July 16th, 2010

hope it also post a thumbnail on it and it can be resized on the admin panel widget

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#6 by James at October 8th, 2008

Great plugin! Props to u.

I have two questions.

1. What CSS code are u using to get that dotted border around your links and the yellow background?

2. When u install the plugin, the plugin is set to a default category. Now, when I change the category and press Update Options it properly updates it on the front end but when you look at the category dropdown box on the admin side, the value is set to the initial default value.

I’ll see if there is anything that might enrich this plugin.

#7 by clifgriffin at October 8th, 2008

Hi James, I’m glad you like it.
1. border:dotted; It’s really easy and a nice effect.
2. Yes, that is “by design” or, in other words, I was lazy. I will eventually update that page to automatically set the drop down box to the correct entry. (I might have to use javascript…haven’t investigated yet)

I’m writing any suggestions down and will update the plugin with the best suggestions soon.

Clif

#8 by James at October 8th, 2008

As for #1, I see what u mean. I looked at the CSS and there it was. Strange thing is, on my site, it doesn’t reflect the border nor the background color. The background is the same as my blog’s default background color and for the border, there’s no border whatsoever. It may be my computer or my main CSS might be overriding your featcat CSS. Hmmm… It’s not a big deal or anything but it would be nice to have that dotted border showing on my blog.

#9 by clifgriffin at October 8th, 2008

What’s your blog url? Also, what browser are you using?

#10 by James at October 8th, 2008

My blog is not live yet. It’s local right now. I’m on IE6.0

#11 by clifgriffin at October 8th, 2008

That could be your problem. I have tested it in IE 7, IE8, Firefox, Opera, and Safari.

#12 by Raju at October 9th, 2008

i have one minor issue, in the sidebar, featured category is interfering with Recent Posts widget, I cant understand why. If I am not clear, you can see for yourself in my homepage on right sidebar

#13 by clifgriffin at October 9th, 2008

Wow, great catch.

The reason is simple: the recent posts widget uses The_Loop AND is on the home page. I will figure out how to fix this and release an update by the end of the day.

ALSO, I have fixed the problem of the categories drop down box not updating properly. It was simply HTML…no javascript required.

#14 by clifgriffin at October 9th, 2008

Fixed. The new version is up:
http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/featured-category.zip

Thanks for the feedback both of you.

#15 by Raju at October 10th, 2008

perfect now cheers!!

#16 by Raju at October 10th, 2008

Hi, I guess a bit too soon. There is a bug in this release. The name of the folder has been changed to “featured-category” and it was “featuredcategory” before. I am getting this error – “Warning: file_get_contents(/home/xxx/public_html/wp-content/plugins/featuredcategory/featcat_style.css) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/xxx/public_html/wp-content/plugins/featured-category/featured_category.php on line 110″

I have fixed it in my local anyway.

#17 by clifgriffin at October 10th, 2008

That is really weird. I don’t know how that happened.

I’ll take a look at my source. I definitely didn’t rename any folders.

#18 by clifgriffin at October 11th, 2008

And fixed!

The original version you downloaded was a version I packaged myself.

When wordpress creates the zip file, it picked its own name for the plugin directory.

This shouldn’t be a problem in the future.

Thanks again for helping me iron this stuff out!

#19 by Raju at October 11th, 2008

oh ok… my pleasure

#20 by Raju at November 26th, 2008

Hi,
There is an update available for this plugin. Major update?

Raju

#21 by clifgriffin at November 26th, 2008

Previous update. When I uploaded 1.0.2 I didn’t update the version number in the main file so it appeared to be 1.0.1.

This version is the one with the correct path. (the bug you reported)

Reply Quote
- #22 by Raju at November 27th, 2008
  
  oh ok I am chased by my web host to reduce my resource usage Missing this cool plugin since few days
  
  Reply Quote
  - #23 by clifgriffin at November 27th, 2008
    
    That’s super lame. What host are you using?
    
    Reply Quote

#24 by Steve at November 28th, 2008

This is actually a very neat plugin. How can I change it so it will display categorized pages as well?
Thanks!
Steve

#25 by clifgriffin at November 28th, 2008
I would have to investigate it.

You would have to rework this query:

$my_query = new WP_Query("cat=".$category."&showposts=".$num_posts);

Right now it only pulls back posts. I’ll investigate how to change the query to include pages and consider including it as an option in my next version.
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#26 by Allan Chaney at January 9th, 2009

Clifton,

I really like this plugin. It’s a simple single purpose plugin but what a very cool feature. Thanks so much for sharing it.

My suggestion for future revisions would be to allow the user to modify the style using the existing Featured Category Settings form. This would broaden the appeal of the plugin by making it customizable to those who don’t want to delve into HTML coding. You could have some drop down fields that allow the user to type in a color code, choose a border type etc. And then clicking update would update the featcat_style.css.

Again, great plugin!
Allan Chaney

#27 by clifgriffin at January 9th, 2009

Thank you for the kind words. I prefer effective, single purpose plugins rather than plugins that can do everything, but nothing well.

Your suggestion is a good one…and one I’ve been thinking about doing but hadn’t motivation. I will definitely include this in the next version.

Clif

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#28 by Melton Cartes at January 22nd, 2009

Hi, Clif:

Thanks for your work. I’m going to try it out.

However, I’m looking for something slightly different. I’m going to blurt in case you or someone else knows of a solution…

1.) Is it possible to have the The Loop on index.php or home.php show a Page (content created in the Admin panel for Home, for instance) as well as Recent Posts beneath that Page’s content?
I hand-coded content into my Index.php to create a fake version of this idea on my site (http://www.anadguy.com) and on this non-profit site (http://www.abdf.org) but I would prefer to allow that to be edited by others as any normal page and not have me be the bottleneck.

2.) If not using The Loop for Recent Posts is there a way to show graphics or images that are part of these “recent posts” using Excerpt (or something else)? The “Watch videos of our recent performances.” section on this non-profit site attempts to do that, but of course doesn’t show “videos” or even thumbnail graphics… (http://www.albanymusic.org).

3.) Selecting a category is great. But is there a way to show Recent Posts for all categories except Cat ‘x’?

Thanks!

#29 by Kenneth at January 29th, 2009

Hey!
Loving your plug-in but would love it if you can show me a bit of code that will display an excerpt or whole post please!!! I’m useless at php/css so any help would be much appreciated!

#30 by Sarah M. at February 28th, 2009

I’d like to know how to add an excerpt as well please!

Also, I would like it to show up in the sidebar. Any ideas?

#31 by clifgriffin at March 4th, 2009
Because of the way the plugin is implemented, a sidebar implementation would be very difficult to achieve and essentially result in a rewrite.

Adding an excerpt is easier but I’m not sure how that would be formatted.

foreach ($my_query->posts as $cpost) { setup_postdata($cpost); echo "
"; echo "ID); echo "\">"; echo $cpost->post_title; echo ""; echo "
"; }

You would simply need to echo $cpost->post_excerpt wherever you desire I think…I could be wrong.

Let me know if you run into troubles and I’ll give you some help.

Clif
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#32 by Peter Lurie at March 10th, 2009

Hi Cliff!
I have used this plugin, and it has appeared on the front page. I gather that this is a “given”… since we don’t include any php code on our Index page.

I have 2 issues:
1) I selected 5 items, and I get a zillion.
2) I would like to display the “more” tag on the front page, and by inserting the correct code on the index page, I still get no change to the display.

Any suggestions/ideas?
Peter

#33 by clifgriffin at March 10th, 2009

Hi Peter,
When you select display 5 items, it displays all items from the selected category? Is this true no matter what category you pick?

I don’t understand what you mean on number 2, could you explain what you’re trying to accomplish?

Thanks,
Clifton

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#34 by hendry at April 13th, 2009

Nice plug in…

i have install your plugin,…

my question, how to MOVE this plugin to SIDEBAR,
thks

http://www.pakkatnews.com

#35 by Chris at April 16th, 2009

Hi Clifton,

This is a great plugin. Can you help with the excerpt? I installed the bit of code you mentioned earlier but doesn’t seem to be working. Thanks so much.

CHris

#36 by Michael at July 18th, 2009

Super plugin mille merci
lot of thanks

#37 by cheryl at August 27th, 2009

Hi Clifton,
I can’t seem to get any featured category to show up on the home page of my site. Any suggestions?
thanks,
cheryl

#38 by cheryl at August 27th, 2009

Just looked a little deeper and it’s appearing on my blog page (talkin’) not the static homepage where I want it to appear. Is there a way to make it appear on the static home page?

#39 by clifgriffin at September 1st, 2009

There’s no easy way to do this that I know of. The code has to be executed from a WordPress page.

Sorry

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#40 by Michael at November 26th, 2009

I was looking at your Featured Category plug-in and another but neither show all my categories. Both show the first category I made, site news, but none of the others. Any ideas why? Could it have to do with Permalinks?

#41 by Pedro at January 4th, 2010

How to move this plugging? I would like to put it anywhere on my frontpage…

#42 by clifgriffin at January 5th, 2010

I can’t be moved in this release. Sorry.

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#43 by Colin at January 8th, 2010

Hi Clifton

Great plugin – really useful for a lot of sites I’m working on at the moment.

Is it possible to have more than one featured category? I know this kind of defeats the purpose of having a featured category plugin but I’ve got a client with lots of news items spread over several categories and he wants to draw attention to them on the front page.

At present, it looks like you can have two but I had a quick look at the featured_category.php file to see if there was a value that could be changed there and couldn’t see one.

Am I missing something or is it not possible?

Cheers

Colin

#44 by Clifton Griffin at January 8th, 2010

The plugin doesn’t support multiple categories, however posts can be tagged with multiple categories. So your best bet would be to add posts you want to feature to a separate category (maybe “Featured”?) and then point the plugin to that category.

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#45 by spin at January 8th, 2010

Any word on how to add an excerpt. I really like the ease of use but the client isn’t going to go for it if we cant have a little more description.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Bonny

#46 by curnmtlb at January 31st, 2010

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#47 by Jane at March 3rd, 2010

Hi Cliff,

Is it possible to add the featured category to the home page if it is a static page?

Thanks,
Jane

#48 by Taylor at March 28th, 2010

I want to add images to each item (like techcrunch.com or makeuseof.com). Is there a way to impliment this using the post image?

#49 by clifgriffin at March 29th, 2010

It isn’t possible as written, but I’m sure making such an addition would not be too difficult if you are familiar with PHP.

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#50 by dhan at April 1st, 2010

thank for that information, it so usefull

#51 by Sara Paxton at May 21st, 2010

Looking for assistance with the FeatureMe plugin. It only appears on the blog link on my site and not in the featured posts box at the top of the page.

Since this is not working appropriately on the static home page that we’ve set up – can you tell us how to replace the featured posts with an image or other object?
Additionally, we are trying to add a custom logo to the top of the page – any feedback on how to do this? Ive tried locating the spot to edit within the header, bu without any luck

Clifton Griffin