If you build Web sites with Genesis, it’s an absolute no-brainer to install and use this plugin, which is a huge improvement over the “Genesis Featured Page” widget.

Here’s an example of what can appear on the frontend, using three “Genesis Featured Page Advanced” widgets:

I love Genesis. Nowadays I have pretty much standardized on Genesis for all new Web projects.

Bundled with Genesis is the “Genesis Featured Page” widget, which allows you to display — typically in a section of your home page — the title, thumbnail image, and some text for a featured page. Clicking on the thumbnail, title, or “Read more..” text takes the visitor to that page.

I stumbled upon this nifty plugin — Genesis Featured Page Advanced — when I became very dissatisfied with the limited options for diplaying content using the basic “Genesis Featured Page” widget. Your options are, essentially:

• Don’t show any content
• Show all content
• Show a certain number of characters of the content

To be blunt, that kinda sucks.

No content is useless, if you ask me.

All content is almost as useless.

And the first ‘n’ characters of the content is almost never what I want.

What I wanted was to use a manual excerpt.

And, voila!, that’s one of the many features this very cool plugin offers.

Here’s what the standard “Genesis Featured Page” widget looks like:

And jere’s what the “Genesis Featured Page Advanced” widget looks like:

Plugin highlights, from the plugin Web page at WordPress.org (emphasis mine):

• New: You can now add a Custom Page Title
• Display widget title above or below image (Defaults above)
• Display page title above or below image (Defaults below)
• Adds option for widget to link to a custom link
• Adds custom image upload field
• Adds option to adjust the size of custom images
• Adds custom content field, which accepts shortcodes
• Adds option to display the page excerpt
• Adds option to remove the page link from the page title
• Adds option to add the page link to the widget title
• Adds option to remove the page link from the featured or custom image
• Adds option to insert the Learn More link on a new line
• Set the target and rel attributes on all links
• Fields show/hide based on user selection for cleaner UI
• Works alongside the original Genesis – Featured Page widget and other third party widgets
• Uses the same CSS classes as the original Genesis widget, so any styling you are currently using will be passed to this widget
• Genesis 2.0 and HTML5 compatible