The Plugin
With the Advanced Featured Post Widget you can put a certain post into focus, by displaying it in one of your widget areas. You can decide, whether or not to display the post thumbnail and whether the post titel is on top or under that thumbnail. Style your widget in a different way to give it even more exposure. ‘Advanced’ means in this case, that even if your theme doesn’t allow you to hide sidebars, you can specify in the widget on what type of page it is visible.
Select the post to be displayed simply by choosing it from a drop down menu, to have a backup post (to be shown, when the main post from the widget appears on a single post page) just give a second post in another drop down.
History
We needed something to feature certain posts in the widget area of the theme, we are using. But not every theme seems to let you hide the sidebar(s) on certain pages. That’s why we made, next to the basic version of the Featured Post Widget, this a bit more extended version of it. You can specify, where the widget is shown and if wanting to, you can style the links seperately in the settings section.
Current Version
The current version is 2.0 and has a Dutch and a German translation as well. Furthermore, you can define a ‘read more’ link for the featured posts, if needing one. It’s more foolproof now, since if you forget to choose a post, there is a random post shown instead.
Change Log
1.5 The textareas are now resizable and the input fields got smaller
1.1 Bug with empty stylesheet on possible update fixed; settings accessible from plugin page now
1.0 Initial release with German and Dutch language pack
Installation
To install the Advanced Featured Post Widget Plugin simply download it here, unzip the file and upload the folder named “advanced-featured-post-widget” into the /wp-content/plugins folder of your blog.
Once you have done that, simply activate “Advanced Featured Post Widget” in your plugin panel and customize the instances of your widgets, when you place them into your sidebars.
Screenshots
This is the plugin working with WP 3.1 and the 2010 theme.
Styling of the links
Widget Settings
Donation
If you use the plugin and like it, we appreciate a donation. If you find the plugin useful and like it very much, we appreciate your feedback even more.
