Three things are added to Posts → All Posts, and all three exist to answer a question you would otherwise have to open forty posts to answer.
The thumbnail column
The featured image is the most visible thing about a post and the easiest to forget. The column turns the audit into a glance down a strip of squares, where a missing image is a hole you can see.
The picture is also the control. Click a cell, pick an image in the usual media modal, and the row updates in place. Nothing else about the post is touched — no draft to publish, no revision to explain.
Pictures are shown resized rather than centre-cropped, so a wide hero and a portrait look like what they are. The column appears on any post type that supports a featured image, apart from pages.
Who the post is for
Beside the title, in the same place WordPress writes — Draft, Sticky, you get the access badge: Members, Paid, or the tiers a post is limited to. Public posts carry no badge, because most posts are public and a badge on all of them says nothing.
The whole row is tinted too. The question is usually asked of the screen rather than of one post — you are scanning for the odd one out — and a tint answers at a glance where a column makes you read down it.
The badge reads the same value the front end reads, so it cannot disagree with what a reader sees. Set the value in the post’s Access box; see who a post is for.
Featured
A star column, one click to toggle, and a matching toggle in the post editor sidebar. It marks a story as one to lead with.
It is not WordPress’s sticky flag, and that is on purpose. Sticky is a promise about ordering the blog index: core floats a sticky post to the top of the main query and of anything that forgets to opt out, so marking three stories important quietly reorders your archive. Featured changes nothing about how the site behaves until something asks for it.
What asks for it:
- our themes, on the front page
- the Editorial Blocks post grid, list and hero blocks, which can filter on it
- your own templates, through
owldraft_featured_posts()andowldraft_featured_query_args()— see the theme API
Featured is content rather than configuration — an editorial fact about the post, kept where the post is.
Next: the Members screen.