WP-SmartFeatures

Users can designate a specific keyword that will be used in providing featured content. If you have ever seen a breaking news alert on, say, CNN.com, then you can possibly see the value of keyword based “content floating”. Need everything tagged ‘Mumbai’ to show up as ‘featured’? What about ‘Red Sox’ around World Series time? This will take some of the hand-rolling currently necessary out of designating featured articles.

Self Serving Stuff

This plugin was created by Aaron Brazell of Technosailor.com. I will often write about WordPress as well as other interesting things in the business, technology and entrepreneurship world. You should subscribe.

1. Upload wp-smartfeatures to wp-content/plugins/
2. Activate
3. Add keyword on the Settings > Reading screen

I am using WordPress 2.6. How come this plugin will not work?

First of all, why are you using WordPress 2.6?! Update NOW.

Secondly, the plugin requires WordPress 3.2 or higher as PHP 5.2+ is required to run this plugin.

Can I designate more than one keyword?

Not at this time, but soon.

How do I use this thing?

I have provided one template tag for use in your theme. It is the smart_featured() tag. It takes 2 optional arguments. The first argument is $term and can be used to override the option set in WordPress admin. The second argument is $post_count and it designates the number of posts that should be returned as “featured”. The default is 1.

The Post Data is returned as a raw object, so you will need a little PHP to work this stuff out. That said, I’ve intentionally left it raw to find out what the community wants? If you provide some feedback, I can work it in – I just don’t want to assume anything.