How to create an easy-to-use interface for "Featured Content"
How Do I?
I wanted a simple interface that would allow content managers to select entries to be “Featured” on our site, but ONLY entries matching certain criteria. I did NOT want the managers to have to check for that criteria manually, so I needed to come up with some way to weed out entries that do not match the requirements.
After some thinking and tinkering, I came up with the solution posted here:
http://expressionengine.stackexchange.com/questions/35453/how-to-build-a-featured-content-system/35459#35459
It features a single-page, two-column design. One column shows a list of entries that meet the criteria making them eligible to be featured. The other column shows a list of currently-featured entries. Each entry has a single button allowing the entry to be “Featured” or “Un-Featured.”
I hope this is helpful to someone else. It just seemed like too nice of a system to keep to myself. 😊
I’ve accomplished the same using Statuses. It’s probably much more efficient than doing a search on a checkbox.
I thought about statuses, but there were some reasons they weren’t a good solution in this case. Anyway, the search on the checkbox field seemed to work quickly enough - the page didn’t slow down until I added the nested Channel Form tag within the Channel Entries loop. That’s obviously a massive amount of overhead (it nearly tripled the number of queries for the page), but I couldn’t think of another way to get single-click “Feature This” functionality, which is what our content managers wanted.