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When an article has only one category, checking the Featured Article checkbox causes a new checkbox to appear immediately below the Featured Article checkbox; that checkbox is labeled with the name of the category and is by default checked. That works reasonably well, except that you can then uncheck the category box, leaving only the Featured Article checkbox checked, and what that means is not very clear (more on that later).

When an article has more than one category, checking the Featured Article checkbox causes multiple new checkboxes to appear immediately below the Featured Article checkbox, one for each category; none of those checkboxes are checked by default. If you save the article in this state, you may think that you have set this article to be a Featured Article. That's pretty reasonable, considering that the checkbox by "Featured Article" is checked. But that's not the case -- the article is not saved as a Featured Article, as you can confirm by editing the article again, and seeing that the Featured Article checkbox is not checked.

What becomes clear from trial and error is that there is no such thing as a Featured Article independent of a category; an article can only be featured within one or more of its categories. It seems to me that it would indeed be useful to have a featured article independent of a category; that would cause it to appear at the very top of the list of articles even when you are viewing ALL categories (which, after all, is the default view).

Restricting the Featured Article feature to only apply to a category makes it less useful. The most important place to make sure that an article appears at the top is in the default view, and we've not been given a feature that allows us to place an article there. That's unfortunate.

So I believe the issue is that we need a validator to make you check a catagory once you have checked featured article? If I understand correctly?

jeffevannelson wrote:So I believe the issue is that we need a validator to make you check a catagory once you have checked featured article? If I understand correctly?

That would be a helpful UI change, given the way it works now, where the Featured Article setting can apply to only a category (or multiple categories).

But a second point is that it could be useful to specify a featured article that transcends categories and appears at the top of the list when "All" is the selected category filter (which is the default view).

This is listed on the Known limitations page on the wiki:

You cannot pin a featured article to the top of the homepage. You can only pin featured articles to a specific category.

So, I would guess that means pinning a feature to the "homepage", or the All category, is a planned feature.

Something else that would help here is a label that says something like:

Apply "Featured" status to:

right below the feature check box but above the individual category checkboxes.
Or remove the "Featured Article" checkbox completely and just have a label that says

"Feature in:"

followed by check boxes for each category added to the list (the event for adding each category would have to make the category checkbox appear rather than the Featured Article check event making them appear.)