Thread

How do you manage featured content on your EE2 website?

Website I’m working is your typical news portal. It has several channels defined. Homepage should display hand picked pick entries from any channel AND latest entries from “news” channel.

Now the question…

What do you use to “promote” an entry to homepage (and well manage homepage content)?
- categories?
- sticky?
- custom fields?
- some nice add-on?

Thanks!

Custom statuses are perfect for this.

Custom statuses are great as Ingmar suggests - just remember that once you have “live” content existing in more than the “open” status you have to explicitly declare a status parameter on every channel:entries tag where both open& featured entries need to appear.

It’s a good reason to consider a custom field and the search:in parameter instead.

Thanks for the feedback guys!

I like the “status” solution for lot of reasons. But it does seem like a quick fix (doesn’t sound right to mix OPEN, CLOSED and FEATURED as FEATURED is subset of OPEN - also I’d need to update bunch of templates to show entries with status FEATURED - as Michael pointed out).

On the other hand, when using custom fields you can’t show multiple channels if they have different field groups.

I’d normally use category groups & resort to some PHP dirty work ({exp:channel:entries channel="news" category="not 12"} still doesn’t work if the channel has multiple category groups assigned), but was hoping to find a more elegant solution.

It’s a good reason to consider a custom field and the search:in parameter instead.

Can you elaborate a bit on how you would do this?

I decided to go with Low Variables add-on.

Few reasons why:
- easy to feature multiple entries even if they are in different channels with different custom field groups
- no need to create extra custom fields and add to the clutter
- provides easy to access overview of featured entries which you can’t do with CF solution
- no need to fiddle with the templates to accommodate “status” solution
- makes more sense than “status” solution (I don’t like mixing open/closed/featured)

I decided to go with Low Variables add-on.

Few reasons why:
- easy to feature multiple entries even if they are in different channels with different custom field groups
- no need to create extra custom fields and add to the clutter
- provides easy to access overview of featured entries which you can’t do with CF solution
- no need to fiddle with the templates to accommodate “status” solution
- makes more sense than “status” solution (I don’t like mixing open/closed/featured)

Just read the documentation and having a brain freeze - How exactly did you use it to manage featured articles?  Care to share your code snippet?

It’s a good reason to consider a custom field and the search:in parameter instead.

Can you elaborate a bit on how you would do this?

1. Create a custom field. Call it “featured”. Make it a drop-down, with a value of “yes”.

2. Where you want to display featured content use this code:

{exp:channel:entries channel="stuff" search:featured="yes"}
  {title}
   {etc}
{/exp:channel:entries}

You can read more about the search parameter here.

It’s a good reason to consider a custom field and the search:in parameter instead.

Can you elaborate a bit on how you would do this?

1. Create a custom field. Call it “featured”. Make it a drop-down, with a value of “yes”.

2. Where you want to display featured content use this code:

{exp:channel:entries channel="stuff" search:featured="yes"}
  {title}
   {etc}
{/exp:channel:entries}

You can read more about the search parameter here.

Seems like a very simple elegant solution - So is using Low Variables here a bit too much for this specific problem?

It depends.  With this approach it would take another extension (which I’m not sure is available for EE 2 but is for EE 1) to “see” featured content from the Edit interface, as custom fields don’t appear in the list by default.

But personally between this or using Status (which seems to appeal to me more than Milan and would make featured visible in the Edit tab) I’d have a hard time justifying the use of a commercial 3rd party add-on to create featured content.

One thing I should have noted is that you can specify status as “not Closed” - so anywhere featured and open content need to appear together can be handled that way.  Between that and a quick Control Panel search to find templates where the status would need to be specified it seems pretty straightforward.

For some reason ( perhaps, wrong coding on my part ) , I have had problems with using custom status to show featured content.  I will try out the use of the custom field approach. thanks ....

Jumping in on an old discussion, but it’s pertinent.  I, too, want to be able to set one entry from a channel as “featured” (say, a featured employee on the homepage).  I understand that I can create a custom status called, say, Featured, and can set the employee I want featured to Yes. Got that much. So what happens when next month I want to feature a different employee?  Do I have to remember to set the first one’s Featured status to No, and then set the new one to Yes?

Is there an elegant way to have a Custom Status “automatically” change all other Featured statuses to No?  otherwise, I can easily see a situation where more than one employee are marked as Featured.

thanks,
benjy

I finally went with the Low Variables solution even though the custom field solution works very well.  Low Variables solves the problem you mention - it allows me to simply select an entry and make it “featured” and and also drop any entry from the featured list - all in a nice intuitive interface. You can have one or several featured items.

Do I have to remember to set the first one’s Featured status to No, and then set the new one to Yes?

Yes, sometimes you do have to manage your content..😉

Keep in mind you can use the multi-entry editor to change status - select multiple entries using checkboxes on the edit tab then scroll down and choose edit in the drop-down.

The other thing to remember is once you use a status besides ‘Open’ to display content on the site you’ll need to specify all statuses everywhere - IE rather than just not having to specify status in channel:entries tags you’ll now need to specify both ‘open|featured’ everywhere they need to display together.

Yes, sometimes you do have to manage your content..😉

Yeah, yeah, yeah, manage content…blah blah blah. 😊

Thanks for the info, though…I was just hoping to make it easier (read: less idiot-proof) for my client.