The internal implementation details of that feature are of questionable sanity.
- If you take a look at said
featured-content.phptemplate you would see - that it get posts from
twentyfourteen_get_featured_posts()however - the only thing that function has is
twentyfourteen_get_featured_postsfilter - from quick look at which in peculiar fashion nothing is actually getting hooked
- because
twentyfourteen_setup()declaresfeatured-contentfeature - with configuration defining
featured_content_filteras the one above - to which
Featured_Contentclass hooks itsget_featured_posts()method - which burrows further to
get_featured_posts_ids()method - which calculates, caches, and returns those IDs
So there are a… few points at which you can work with… this. 🙂
From practical point of view you would probably want to hook into twentyfourteen_get_featured_posts filter and conditionally return different set of posts as you need.