Through use of our own marketplace, we often identify small but useful changes to IP.Downloads that benefit sites that both use IP.Downloads to allow distribution of free files as well as those that sell files through a marketplace. While working to improve the user interface of the home page in IP.Downloads, we decided that allowing multiple featured files would be a small change but would help improve the interaction and discoverability of useful content in the marketplace. After all, every other marketplace has more than one file featured, right?
IP.Downloads 2.5.3 will now allow you to feature more than one file. Up to 20 of the most recent files that are marked as featured will display on the homepage in a carousel-style panel. The act of featuring a file has not changed (the only thing that has changed here is that other files which are featured are no longer automatically unfeatured). Only the homepage interface has really changed.
Here is a short video to show you what it looks like with two featured files. Note that if you only have one featured file, it will display as it does now in IP.Downloads 2.5.2.
http://screencast.com/t/A0KX6uWs
You will note that you can manually cycle through featured files, or they will cycle automatically. If you mouse over the featured file panel, the automatic cycling pauses.
We hope you find this small change useful, and more consistent with other applications that allow featuring (such as IP.Blog, where you can feature more than one entry, and IP.Gallery, where you can feature more than one image). Let us know what you think in the comments below!