Add specific class to featured posts

Question

Actually I'm using this loop to get my posts in homepage:

                    <ul class="news">
                        <?php
// The query
$page = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
$additional_loop = new WP_Query("posts_per_page=10&category__not_in=3&category__not_in=15,&paged=".$page);
query_posts('posts_per_page=12&category__not_in=3&category__not_in=15');
// The Loop
while ($additional_loop->have_posts()) : $additional_loop->the_post();
$thumb = wp_get_attachment_image_src( get_post_thumbnail_id($post->ID), 'latesthome');
$url = $thumb['0'];
?>
                        <li>
                            <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>">
                                <span class="articleimg" style="background-image: url('<?php echo $url; ?>');"></span>
                                <span class="articletitle"><?php the_title(); ?></span>
                                <span class="articleinfo">di <?php the_author(); ?>, <?php the_time('j F Y'); ?> 
<?php 
if (in_category('1')) { 
?>
<span class="typetag article"></span>
                                    <?php }
else if (in_category('2')) {
?>
                                    <span class="typetag review"></span>
                                    <?php }
?>
                                    </span>
                            </a>
                        </li>
<?php
endwhile;
// Reset Query
wp_reset_query();?> 
                    </ul>

When I set a post as "featured" it remains at the top (as first element) of the list, so works really good.

But I need to assign a particular class to li of featured posts, like this:

<li class="hot">

How I can do this? I really have no idea.

Answer 1

I hope that "featured" will be a custom field of posts. In that case you can check the value of field using:

$desc = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'featured', true);

You can use if-else condition and check that if you get value=1 {or what you assigned for featured} then apply class"hot".

Give it a try.

best of luck