samuel joseph levy

click the image for the full report (in pdf form)

The Featured column on osmoothie has been fixed so that I can manage its content from WordPress itself- as opposed to hard-coding each entry in the sidebar. I have been avoiding this thinking it would take too much time, but have found that it’s actually very easy to do using the “Custom Fields” functionality.

First create a category that we will assign all our Featured posts to. The category number will be used as a condition to query our featured posts.

Next we need to create custom fields. Custom fields allow you to add additional data to your posts that can be retrieved from anywhere on the site. In this case I needed a field for an image thumbnail, alt text for the thumbnail, and a short description of the post.

Edit the posts that you want to be featured and add them to the category you created earlier.

Additionally, for each post expand the “Custom Fields” box and add a new entry for the following fields: featured_img, featured_text, and featured_alt.

Enter in desired values for the custom fields.

I use the most relevant image in my post (the 150×150 thumbnail version that WordPress generates happens to fit my sidebar best), for the value of my featured_img field. Make sure the value of your featured_img field is the full path of the image, for example:

http://osmoothie.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/geithner_stressed-150x150.jpg

For the featured_alt name, use the text you want to appear when someone mouse’s over the featured_img.

For the featured_text I simply extracted the most descriptive line from the post so readers can get an idea of what the post is about before clicking on it.

Next we need to add some code to our template. Using a loop we can call up post data, such as with any recent topics plugin, along with our custom fields.

Find the best place for the implementation of your list. On the sidebar of my template I added the following code:

<?php
	$featured_posts = get_posts('numberposts=4&category=3149');  

	foreach( $featured_posts as $post ) {
		$featured_image = get_post_custom_values('featured_image', $post->ID);
		$featured_text = get_post_custom_values('featured_text', $post->ID);
        $featured_alt = get_post_custom_values('featured_alt', $post->ID); ?>

        <table width="100%" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2" style="background-color:#F6F7F8; padding:5px;"><tr><td style="text-align:left;"><strong><a href="<?php echo get_permalink($post->ID); ?>"><?php echo $post->post_title; ?></a></strong>
        <br />
        <img src='<?php echo $featured_image[0]; ?>' width='100' align='right' title='<?php echo $featured_alt[0]; ?>' style="border: 3px solid #FFFFFF; margin:4px; padding:0;"><?php echo $featured_text[0]; ?>
        </tr></td></table>

        <br />

<?php
	}
?>

Be sure to change line 1, where it says &category=3149 to the identification number of the category you created earlier (you can get this from the url of the category when editing it). You may also change the numberposts param to a desired value.

Notice that when we output our declared custom field variables we must use a [0], this is because the get_post_custom_values grabs an array of the data and our value only consists of one record.

Piece of cake!

click the image for the full report (in pdf form)

click the image for the full report (in pdf form)