In this month’s featured plugin, we look at the EDD Featured Downloads extension for Easy Digital Downloads. The extension allows you to list and highlight certain products/downloads on different parts of your store.
Highlighting certain products can help draw attention to them, especially if you have a large product catalog. You can use the extension to showcase products for a number of reasons, including:
- Newly launched products
- Products on sale or featured in a promotion
- Most popular items
- Common cross-sell items
Now, let’s take a look at how you can set and display downloads as featured using the extension.
Once you install and activate the plugin, there are two ways to set specific downloads as featured. First, you can mark a download as featured in the Edit Download area.
The second way to set downloads as featured is through the Quick Edit option on the All Downloads page.
In this way, you can quickly set multiple downloads as featured. You can see which downloads are featured on this screen through the Featured column.
This can be help identify featured items if you have a large number of them displayed on your store.
Once you have set the products you want to feature, you can display these on different parts of your store easily by adding the shortcode [edd_featured_downloads]
. This can be added to different parts of pages, posts, etc.
By default, the shortcode displays the the product image, link to the product page, the excerpt, and the add-to-cart button. The shortcode uses the same parameters as the [downloads]
shortcode. You can modify the parameters to display the featured products the way you want. For example, you can remove the excerpt by setting excerpt="false"
in order to streamline what’s displayed.
If you would like to add featured downloads often into multiple pages or posts, you can add PHP code to your template files. You can customize the code to change the display of the items.
The EDD Featured Downloads extension gives you a quick way to set and display specific products on different parts of your Easy Digital Downloads store. Once you’ve set which downloads to feature, you can add a shortcode to areas where you want to highlight these.
The shortcode uses the same parameters as the [downloads]
shortcode in Easy Digital Downloads. You can change these parameters to modify the featured downloads. In addition, you can use PHP code within template files to display featured products.
Do you feature certain products on different parts of your store? Tell us how in the comments below.