johanvandemerwe

Users that have the Genesis Theme Framework installed are already known with the Genesis Featured Page 
plugin. This extended version looks almost the same, but adds the possibility to add a thumbnail of your 
own choice. This can be any image in your media library.
To add a different image, just switch off the “Show featured image” and place the name of the image in 
the URL. To make it even easier, you just enter here the name of the image as in “take-this-picture.png”. 
The plugin makes sure that the selected format is taken from your media library.
Bonus:
With this plugin it is also possible to show the excerpt of an article (which is not in the original Genesis plugin). 
!important! For this to work you have to install the Page Excerpt Plugin by Jeremy Massel.
How to use the image URL:
without month/year in media permalinks:
/montepulciano.jpg
with/year in media permalinks:
/10/2014/montepulciano.jpg
So you use the image name + extension starting after the /uploads in the media permalink. 
Don’t use the show featured image and the Image URL at the same time. That will show the featured image set in the page.
You can find that plugin here: 
<a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/page-excerpt/" rel="ugc">Link to Page Excerpt Plugin by Jeremy Massel (opens in new window)</a>

Genesis Featured Page Extended

Extends the Genesis Featured Page plugin. Show as thumbnail any image in your media library and show your page excerpt. Requires Genesis Framework.

Nick the Geek

Genesis Featured Widget Amplified adds additional functionality to the Genesis Featured Posts Widget. Specifically it:
<ul>
<li>Supports Custom Post Types</li>
<li>Supports Custom Taxonomies</li>
<li>Exclude Term by ID field</li>
<li>Supports Pagination</li>
<li>Supports Meta Key Values</li>
<li>Supports Sorting by Meta Key</li>
<li>Multiple Hooks and Filters for adding additional content</li>
</ul>
This plugin requires the <a href="http://studiopress.com" rel="nofollow ugc">Genesis Theme Framework</a> 
While the plugin will work on the HTML5 “Pro” themes, the HTML markup only supports the older XHTML themes at this time. It is not recommended for use on the new HTML5 themes.
Thanks to David Decker, this plugin is translation ready. German translation files included.
<h3>Special Thanks</h3>
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to all the folks at StudioPress, their themes make my life easier.
Gary Jones (aka GaryJ) provided guidance on several issues related to debugging and documentation

Genesis Featured Widget Amplified

Genesis Featured Posts with support for custom post types, taxonomies, and so much more

Genesis Featured Page Extended vs Genesis Featured Widget Amplified