Zyllyx
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Oct 15, 2002, 11:09 AM
Post #5 of 5
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Re: [jmueller0823] Featured Article.. questions
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Awright, let me see if I can remember the exact sequence of steps. Please note this presupposes you are using SSI in all of your pages.
1) Create a category for your Featured Article repository. At my site the category is titled "Spotlight." Make sure you select the "Hide category and articles" option.
2) Figure out how many featured articles you want to display on your site's index page, then in the "Articles Per Page" field select "Custom" and enter that number in both the "Articles" and "Headlines" boxes -- we generally only spotlight one article at a time, so I have 1 for both.
3) In the "Category Filename" field, select "Custom" and choose a unique filename, preferably something similar to your category title (e.g. spotlight.shtml).
4) You may or may not choose to make unique templates for your featured articles. However, for this feature to work you need to create at least one template for the Category Index Page. I have attached the one I use on my site below. You'll want to put this in your /artman/templates/index directory and then select it in the proper pulldown in the Category Index Page field. The key for this template is that it be bare bones without any of the trappings of your other templates -- you'll see why in a minute.
5) Next, you'll want to edit your site's default index page template. Find the place on the page where you want to put your featured articles -- you will put the SSI call to your Featured Article index page there. Here is the code snippet from RacingPress.com that calls the Featured Article SSI in a table:
<TABLE WIDTH="100%" BORDER="0" ALIGN="CENTER" BGCOLOR="#000000">
<TR>
<TD>
<DIV ALIGN="LEFT">
<B><FONT FACE="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"
SIZE="1" COLOR="#FFFFFF">
>>FEATURED ARTICLE</FONT></B>
</DIV>
</TD>
</TR>
<TR>
<TD BGCOLOR="#DDDDDD">
<!--#include virtual="/publish/spotlight.shtml" -->
</TD>
</TR>
</TABLE>
You'll note that the SSI include calls the index page for the hidden category that is created using the bare-bones template you used -- which is why you don't want that template to be too fancy! 
6) Now, go into your Admin area and select the article(s) you want to highlight. In each article you want to highlight, change the category to your Featured Article category. Then republish all of your pages.
If I haven't bolloxed the instructions, what you should now see is a nice Featured Articles area on your index page that shows your desired articles.
KNOWN ISSUES:
When you click on a Featured Article, the hidden category WILL be displayed in your category_list navigation. If you click on the hidden category, it will display the bare-bones category index that normally is shown as an include in your page index. Hopefully in future AM releases there will be an option to include or not include hidden categories in navigation. 
Also, your Featured Articles will naturally not be available in their normal category indexes -- nor will they be viewable or available in the Webfeed Generator. But it's a small price to pay for the feature, IMO.
DEMO SITE:
You can see this in action at RacingPress.com. It's not fancy, but it works.
Hopefully a similar featuring mechanism will make its way into AM 2.0 (albeit in much more polished form!), but for now this should be a good workaround.
(This post was edited by Zyllyx on Oct 15, 2002, 11:11 AM)
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feature.zip