One of the most requested feature in Magento is the ability to show featured products on the frontend. The idea is to choose the products that should be featured and display them on the home page or in a separate interface. Previous version had a huge demand. It was downloaded over 28,000 times. We are now presenting an update: Featured Products 2.0.

Featured products give you the ability to choose products that will be shown as “featured” from Magento admin area and depending on the configuration, those products can be shown on separate page on URL (http://yoursite.com/featured-products) or on any other Magento page as a separate block.

Featured products 2.0 features include:

• Two separate ways to display “Featured products”:
  1. As stand-alone Magento page
  2. As widget-like block that can be inserted anywhere (mostly used for homepage)
• Rich set of configuration options in Magento admin area
• New improved user friendly Magento grid interface for Featured products management
• Defining featured products on Store View level
• Option to turn On/Off extension from configuration area
• Option to show/hide price and addToCart button (if need to hide the price)
• Change sort order for displayed products for CMS block
• Set the desired number of items to be displayed in CMS block
• Set the desired number of items per row
• Define size for displayed product thumbnail images in CMS block
• Set different layout options for stand-alone page
• Defining featured products on Store View level
• Define Meta-title, Meta description and Meta Keywords for standalone page SEO

This extension is improved following user reviews shared on the older version on Magento Connect. I hope that this new version will meet your expectations.

Here I will try to answer some of the most common user questions:

FAQ:

Q: Which Magento versions is the extension compatible with?
A: Featured products v2.0 is compatible with Magento CE 1.6 and greater and EE 1.11 and greater, and for older Magento versions there is an option to download Featured products v1.2.3

Q: How to increase image size in home page featured product?
A: In version 2.0 it is easily done through configuration options from Magento Admin (System|Configuration|Inchoo|Featured products|CMS page widget|Thumbnail image dimension)

Q: I have purchased the “Call For Price” extension which removes the price and add to cart button on the product page. But this extension still shows price and button on home page. Does anyone know how to remove the price and add to cart button on the home page as well?
A: In version 2.0 it is easily done through configuration options from Magento Admin area

Q: Why do I get 404 error every time I access the config?
A: If you even after log-out and log-in again to your Magento admin still get this error, it is necessarily to manually set ACL permissions for admin user through System|Permissions|Roles in order to make it work.

Q: I have added multiple stores in my site, this extension not able to collect data according to store wise. How can i customize this extension, so featured products are displayed according to store wise?
A: This is natively implemented in version 2.0 and you just need to select appropriate Store view when defining featured products through: Catalog|Featured products screen.

Q: How to make Featured products appear on my home page?
A:

1. After extension installation, it is neccesary to navigate to: CMS|Pages and then click on Home page row in order to edit its content. Make sure to click on row that has “enabled” value.
2. Click on the tab Content on the left side of the screen and then click on the “Hide editor” button on the center of the screen in order to hide visual HTML editor.
3. Inside your Home page content HTML add this: {{block type=”featuredproducts/listing”}} and click on the save page button. That should display the block on your home page.
4. Also make sure that your extension is set to “Active” in System|Configuration area.

The extension is currently being maintained by our Inchooer Zvonimir Buric and is available via his GitHub account. Extension is free, provided as is, without warranty of any kind.

Note! This article was revised on Nov 30, 2012. You will notice that some of the comments are older. This is because the original article was posted in 2010 by Tomislav Bilic.