Featured Item Metabox wordpress plugin resources analysis

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Name	Featured Item Metabox
Version	1.2.3
Author	Kathy Darling
Rating	60
Last updated	2015-01-22 04:14:00
Downloads	694
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Home page

Delta: 0%

Post page

Delta: 0%

Featured Item Metabox plugin has no negative impact on PageSpeed score.

Home page PageSpeed score has been degraded by 0%, while Post page PageSpeed score has been degraded by 0%

Featured Item Metabox plugin added 7 bytes of resources to the Home page and 10 bytes of resources to the sample Post page.

Featured Item Metabox plugin added 0 new host(s) to the Home page and 0 new host(s) to the sample Post page.

Great! Featured Item Metabox plugin ads no tables to your Wordpress blog database.

Resources Added (Post page)

Description

I found I constantly needed a way for clients to mark a post as something they wanted to feature and I've never found sticky posts particularly inuitive and the UI is pretty hidden for new users. The simplest solution was a checkbox in prominently located metabox.

Please note that this plugin, by itself, will not change how your posts are displayed. It just gives the UI to users and a meta key to theme developers to query for.

Usage

This plugin simply adds a _featured meta key to every post with a value of yes for featured items and no for everything else. Actual display of the featured items is entirely up to the theme developer, but an example ( place in your template where you'd like to display a list of featured "Portfolios") might be as follows:

// 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 );

// 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();

Multiple queries per page load can slow down your site so it is worthwhile to take advantage of the Transients API, so an alternate usage would be:

// 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();

Then to ensure that your featured posts list is updated, add a function to your theme's functions.php to delete the transient when a portfolio (in this example) post type is saved.

// 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' );

Simple queries should only need the meta_key and meta_value parameters, but if you need something more advanced then you might want to read about how to use the more complex Meta Query parameters.