Featured posts? Multiple loops?

The code from The Unstandard theme isn’t particularly difficult to port over. It’s actually a pretty clever way of accomplishing what you want to do.

The critically important bit of code that you should be concerning yourself with is this:

$postcount = array();
function is_first_post($id)
{
	global $postcount;
	# Add a new id if one has not been added already
	$postcount[$id] = true;
	# If we're on the first page of posts and the first post
	if ( is_home() && !is_paged() && count($postcount) == 1 )
	return true;
	return false;
}

in functions.php. That is the loop that determines whether or not the post in question is the first one on the page. It is used like this:

<?php echo ( is_first_post($post->ID) ) ? 'main-post-bg' : 'secondary-post-bg left'; ?>

to echo the appropriate class for the post (if the post ID in question is the first post on the page, the post gets a class of main-post-bg. If not, the post gets a class of secondary-post-bg left. He also uses the conditional again along with the get_post_meta() function to grab the appropriately-sized version of the post image.

<?php if ( is_first_post($post->ID) ) $img_src = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'lead_image', true);
                    else $img_src = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'secondary_image', true);
                    if ( $img_src == '' ) $img_src = '/wp-content/themes/theunstandard/images/theunstandard-blank.png';
                ?>

That strikes me as a pretty straightforward method of accomplishing exactly what it is you’re looking to do. All you’d need to do is style the relevant CSS classes, and add a lead_image and secondary_image custom field to each post containing a url for the lead and secondary images.

Cheers.

What’s not working? Are you getting errors? Where did you put the code? How are you styling it? Did you create appropriate custom fields?

This is almost a cut and paste job, but not quite. There are sufficient steps in between to making your theme look the way you want it to.

post your index.php file and your functions.php file in the WordPress Pastebin and post the links here. I’ll have a look and see if I can help.

Your problem is that you haven’t started the loop to get any content for your is_first_post() function to test.

I haven’t tested it, but this:

http://wordpress.pastebin.ca/1500285

ought to do the job.
—-

As for displaying posts from one category, you need to use the query_posts() function when building the loop.

That makes pretty good sense. I thought about that myself when I was working on it, as I noticed you were using timthumb.

As for why it isn’t printing the large image, You’re missing an echo statement in the first if block.

http://wordpress.pastebin.ca/1500316

Sorry, I was editing when you replied. Have a look at the URL above. That should fix the problem.