While working on a new template for Pligg I was trying to come up with the best way to manage articles that would appear on top of the homepage to feature select stories. I originally was thinking that I could use the "Groups" feature for Pligg, or even create a "Featured" category. Then I thought that those methods would not allow me to appropriately label my news and were not the best way to handle the featured news articles that I wanted on the homepage. That's when I turned to CMStheme's Featurify module, which allows admins to manually set up images that link to news article and rotate those images somewhere in your template. A few hours later I had created a "Featured" module for Pligg.

How it works
The first thing you will need to do is upload and install the module. Then add a snippet of code to the template file where you want the featured news to appear. You can do this by adding the following line to a .tpl file:

{$featured}

I suggest that you place it on your homepage by placing it in index_center.tpl and wrapping it with the following code so that it only shows up on the homepage and not the second, third, etc. pages.

{if $pagename == 'index' && count($templatelite.get) == 0}{$featured}{/if}

The Featured module has a nearly identical admin interface to the Featurify module. Admins can log in to the admin area and then navigate to a page where it displays your current featured news items. If you want to remove a news item you can easily edit or delete it, or if you don't have any you can click on the button to "Add Featured News". See the attached screenshots for examples.

The module is set to only grab the latest 4 news items from your Featured News list. The most recent item will be used to display the first news article with a larger image, while the second, third and fourth most recent article appear with a smaller thumbnail.

The template file used for this module ( /modules/featured/templates/featured.tpl ) has been designed to work with the new Arthemia Pligg template. If you are using another template you will want to customize this file to make it look better in your own template. You can also make some small tweaks to the file to change how many stories you want to appear, how many characters the smaller stories get in their descriptions before being cut off and other cosmetic changes.

Lastly, make sure that you CHMOD 0777 the /modules/featured/phpthumb/cache/ directory to ensure that thumbnails are able to be added to that folder.

Credits
CMStheme for his Featurify module.
phpthumb for generating and caching image thumbnails

[oobie11]

Thanks, now just to figure out the css problem.

[oobie11]

Oh, and I just realized I dont have the headline.png either

[lowster11]

Originally Posted by oobie11

Oh, and I just realized I dont have the headline.png either

Here you go:

http://916sac.com/twitpics/headline.png

[LPH]

I installed the featured module today and added two stories. Unfortunately the date and time stamp provided are incorrect. A May 13, 2009 date is showing for a story submitted 01/01/2010.

Is there a setting for the date that is incorrect on my part or is this a featured module problem?

[linkcitypro]

This module had a few bugs e.g. you featured a post but then decided that you want to feature something else. You would naturally try by changing the featured post status from Enabled to disabled in featured administration. Try doing that or try Deleting that featured post. Now go to the main page and you will not see the featured image. You will only see a Black section in place of the image with text on top "phpThumb().... ". This is a bug.

What needs to happen is that when you disable or delete a featured post, the one before it should become the featured post. I fixed this bug. Here is a 1 line fix.

1. Open featured/featured_main.php file.
2. Search for the following code around line 249

$sql = "SELECT * FROM " . table_prefix . "featured ORDER BY featured_id ASC";

3. Replace this line with the following:

$sql = "SELECT * FROM " . table_prefix . "featured WHERE featured_enabled='Yes'  ORDER BY featured_id ASC";

This should fix the bug I mentioned.

[acnn]

I also had the same problem, the image in the headline doesn't work at all ... I've already set CHMOD to 777 but it showed error opening ... "featured/featured.php?=1": 401 authorization required

Anyone can help?

Thanks

[seomaker]

MySql 4.1.22
php 5

Pligg 1.0.3b
Arthemia

Featured
applied CHMOD yankidank (../phpthumb/cache)
applied changes of linkcitypro
if i apply CHMOD in phpThumb.php, image not shown

This is image shown

[linkcitypro]

Originally Posted by seomaker

MySql 4.1.22
php 5

Pligg 1.0.3b
Arthemia

Featured
applied CHMOD yankidank (../phpthumb/cache)
applied changes of linkcitypro
if i apply CHMOD in phpThumb.php, image not shown

This is image shown

Everything was working fine but now i'm also seeing the same error image. Any help?

[linkcitypro]

Nevermind, this was fixed by reapplying the chmod to all folders in the Cache

[lijinglue]

The Module doesn't works well with none-english characters, all text are converted to ??????