Add featured content to theme

Question

I'm running a site for a nonprofit using Wordpress as a CMS. Our theme is a child theme built on top of Twenty Ten.

I'm looking for a plugin or code sample that would allow me to add a "featured content" block to the home page to highlight a current event or partnership. I'm thinking this could be a custom post type. I could code it from scratch, but I'd rather find a plugin that could just be dropped in to get this live as quickly as possible.

My goal is the featured content would have an expiration date where once reached, the content would stop being displayed automatically. A bonus feature would be to prioritize the order of the "live" features being displayed.

Answer 1

I'll direct you to this question I answered a few months back that sounds about the same as what you are looking for but is meant specifically for the use of the 'sticky posts' feature. Otherwise what you could do is dedicate a "Featured" category to this task and create a custom loop at the top of your blog template (most likely index.php). You would end up with something like this at the beginning:

<?php
// conditional tag to test if it is the FIRST blog page
if (is_home()) :
    // code to display only the single most recent post in the featured category
endif; ?>

Keep in mind that this is not tested (the code in the other post works in a production setup perfectly fine), but I'm just writing this on my break :) Let me know if it works or doesn't, as we're all here to help!