“Featured Posts” are a key feature of any news/journal wordpress site. It is pretty easy to develop a wordpress theme to display a fixed number of featured posts from a specific category on the homepage. It can be done using the query_posts() function of wordpress. Here are few lines of code that displays latest 10 posts from the news category , you can edit it to tailor to your needs.
/* Name of your category you want to show posts from */
$cat = "news";
/* No. of posts to display*/
$num = "10";
?>
<!– Show x Posts from $cat category–>
<?php query_posts(’showposts=’.$num.‘&category_name=’.$cat.”);
while (have_posts()) : the_post();
?>
<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
<div class="entry">
<?php the_content(‘Continue…’); ?>
<p class="postmetadata">Posted in <?php the_category(‘, ‘) ?> | <?php edit_post_link(‘Edit’, ”, ‘ | ‘); ?> <?php comments_popup_link(‘No Comments »’, ‘1 Comment »’, ‘% Comments »’); ?></p>
<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" class="permalink">Link to this article</a>
</div>
<?php endwhile; ?>
The function query_posts(); can be used to control which posts are displayed in the loop. More information on using query_posts(); can be found here : http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/query_posts .
