Featured Posts In Sidebar In WordPress
I recently decided to add a “Featured Posts” widget to the sidebar of my blog. My original assumption was that WordPress would have something that could do that from the outset, but I was surprised to find it doesn’t.
But then I was sure there’d be a plugin that could do it. There are, but I was disappointed by every single one of them: Some didn’t install. Some installed and then did nothing. Others installed but didn’t provide a widget, assuming you’d want your featured posts embedded somewhere in your template.
In the end I gave up and thought about the problem laterally until I came up with the following solution: Rather than finding a plugin that tried to do everything for me, I figured I could just use a plugin that shows posts from a category. That way, all I need do to “feature” a post is put it into the relevant category.
Category Posts Widget
There had to be a plugin that could show posts from a specific category in the sidebar. There was, and it was called Category Posts Widget. Simply install this and your WordPress installation will gain a new widget as shown in the screenshot to the right.
As with any widget, drag it into the sidebar area on the right, and then click the arrow to configure it.
But before you configure the widget, first create a new category named, say, “Featured” and add any posts you want to feature into it. This is most easily done by going to Posts > Categories in the menu.
Once you have your new category add the widget to the sidebar and configure it to use the new “featured” category and you’re away. Feel free to change the title of the section as it appears in the sidebar, how many items to show from the category, etc. This widget is quite powerful in that you can choose how to order the articles: Chronologically, randomly, by number of comments, … You can also decide whether you want to show excerpts and thumbnails or not.
Fiddle with the options until you’re happy with the way your new featured posts widget looks.
That’s all there is to it! Now you just need to write some feature-worthy content! Hope that helps somebody.
