What I’m going to do here is go over, briefly, how to add a block to the home page of your site with ONE piece of featured content.
Assumptions
First, we’ll assume you have nodes you’d like to feature on the home page. We’ll also assume that new one’s are added regularly. If they aren’t added regularly, or at all, and you just want to feature different ones from time to time, there is a slightly different way of surfacing them to your users, which we’ll cover later.
Second, I’ll assume you have Views installed and enabled. You’ll need to create a view to add your content to.
Editing Theme Files and Creating your View
The first and most important thing to do is to setup your theme’s .info file and page–front.tpl.php file so that both are displaying the region in which you’ll be placing your featured content block.
Next, go to Admin > Structure > Views and create a new view. Deselect the ‘page’ option and instead creat a ‘block’. Set the block to display only one entry.
On the edit page of your view make sure you’re using ‘Fields’ under Format > Show:. In the Fields area itself select all the fields you want to display. Make sure you also select ‘Content: Nid’ and put it ABOVE ‘Content: Body’. Also make sure to select ‘Content: Link’. Go ahead and exclude the Nid field from the display. Make sure ‘Content: Link’ is set to display the text ‘Read More’ (or whatever you want). This will make the ‘read more’ link actually go to the node you’re referencing.
You may also wish to trim the body text to a predetermined number of characters so it doesn’t run outside your ‘Featured’ block. Click the ‘Content: body’ field and under ‘Rewrite Results’ set ‘Trim this field to a maximum length’. Check it and then set a number of characters.
Under ‘Filter Criteria’ add ‘Content: Promoted to front page’ and set it to ‘yes’.
Make sure the Sort Criteria is set to ‘Content: Post date (desc)’ so it will display the most recent post.
Adding Content to your View
Find a node you’d like to feature and under ‘Publishing options’ check the option ‘Promoted to front page’. Save your node. Note: if you’re only featuring new resources you add on a regular basis you can just check this every time you want to feature a resource and be done with it. If you want to feature an older resource you’ll need to uncheck the option ‘promoted to front page’ for your previously featured node and check this option for the new (old) resource you’d like to feature.
Also make sure to add your new block view to the region you want it to display in in ‘Admin > Structure > Blocks’. Save your settings and reload your home page. If you followed all the steps I just talked about you should see your new ‘Featured’ block on your home page. You may (very likely) still need to style it.