First, you’ll want a quick way to toggle whether a post is featured or not. I wrote a plugin that does this:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/featured-item-metabox/
but I feel like a total dork because I just discovered that this plugin was already doing that!
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/featured-post
Ugh. Anyway, how you want to feature them on the home page will effect how you can query them.
From my plugin’s usage docs this will get a list of all featured “portfolios”. You can adapt the UL list to be whatever you’d like.
// Get any existing copy of our transient data
if ( false === ( $featured_portfolios = get_transient( 'featured_portfolios' ) ) ) {
// It wasn't there, so regenerate the data and save the transient
// params for our query
$args = array(
'post_type' => 'portfolio'
'posts_per_page' => 5,
'meta_key' => '_featured',
'meta_value' => 'yes'
);
// The Query
$featured_portfolios = new WP_Query( $args );
// store the transient
set_transient( 'featured_portfolios', $featured_portfolios );
}
// Use the data like you would have normally...
// The Loop
if ( $featured_portfolios ) :
echo '<ul class="featured">';
while ( $featured_portfolios->have_posts() ) :
$featured_portfolios->the_post();
echo '<li>' . get_the_title() . '</li>';
endwhile;
echo '</ul>';
else :
echo 'No featured portfolios found.';
endif;
/* Restore original Post Data
* NB: Because we are using new WP_Query we aren't stomping on the
* original $wp_query and it does not need to be reset.
*/
wp_reset_postdata();
And because I’m using transients to store the query, we’ll need to update the transient any time you update a portfolio post.
// Create a function to delete our transient when a portfolio post is saved
function save_post_delete_featured_transient( $post_id ) {
if ( 'portfolio' == get_post_type( $post_id ) )
delete_transient( 'featured_portfolios' );
}
// Add the function to the save_post hook so it runs when posts are saved
add_action( 'save_post', 'save_post_delete_featured_transient' );