featured posts section (box like) above posts

You could find a plugin that would add like a slider to the top of your page that cycled through featured posts. But you’re not going to find one that breaks the features down into seperate boxes or adds thumbnails.

This is typically accomplished in the theme, it looks like your theme is a more blog-like layout, you would want a magazine style theme, or to at least steal some code from one to create a homepage like the examples you linked to.

Check out Magazeen, it is a good example of a magazine style layout.

thank you for your reply @jleuze, indeed my theme’s layout is not so “news” friendly, but i have done a lot of css mods on it, so i decided to keep it!

Ah, that is a problem then. I would suggest starting by creating a home Page and setting that as your frontpage.

It might seem counter-intuitive since you do want your posts on the homepage. But once you have Page setup as your homepage, you can create a custom template for that Page and add in the more grid-like layout with thumbnails, without messing up your archive, index, and category files that you will want to leave intact for those sections.

Here is some documentation on creating a page template that should get you started.

In that page template you’ll want to create a custom Loop that only loads the thumbnail, headline, excerpt and other elements of the posts that you want.

Check out the code in some magazine style themes like Magazeen, you can steal a custom loop from there that should work for you.

If you want to add thumbnails, I’d suggest using the new thumbnail feature built into WordPress 2.9. Here is some good instructions on how to add thumbnails.