Question

I want to add a ‘featured page’ button/widget to a sidebar in WordPress that will show a thumbnail of the page as well as the page’s custom excerpt (I’m using http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/page-excerpt/).

I got it sort of working using either a custom text widget or http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/featured-page-widget/ but it doesn’t show the excerpt, it just generates one from the page’s main content.

Anyone know an easy way to do this? My hope was for non-web designers to be able to update this kind of content.

Answer 1

You can easily achieve this by activating this plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/php-text-widget/ You can put your php code in the widget. This means you can also put your WP_QUERY, query_posts or get_posts loop in order for you to get the page you want.

Activate the plugin go to your widget page use the text widget and drag it to your widget area and paste this

<?php
$the_query = new WP_Query();
$the_query->query("page_id=$page_id");
if ($the_query->have_posts()) : 
while($the_query->have_posts()) : $the_query->the_post();
  //show thumbnail
   if(has_post_thumbnail()) :
     the_post_thumbnail(); 
 endif; 
 //show excerpt
   the_excerpt();
endwhile; 
endif; 
wp_reset_postdata();
?>