Core Enhancement 3 - Merge Featured into Articles

[YatharthVyas]

The purpose of this PR is to track all the file changes and commits made. Mentors can review the changes and provide feedback.
I will update the description as and when I push more commits.

Plan Document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Pl8JGa2hkYkmJzQOn9_mS8a4imDmqc2a/edit#heading=h.t5tri5tytv7q

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• Drop-down selector in Articles view
• Merge Model
• Merge tmpl files
• Merge View
• Merge Controller
• Update all links pointing to view=featured
• Test Sample Data
• Remove Featured files
• Update Link of Featured Articles Menu Item

Edit: Merge Table has been removed from the above list because I feel that both the files (in /src/Table/) play an essential role and they must be different

Summary of Changes

[A] New Selector Dropdown

A searchtools selector is added that can be used to toggle between:

Option	Value
All	""
Unfeatured	0
Featured	1

[B] Model Merged

• A new method to return the featured selector filter parameter using the getUserState from request

$featured = $this->getUserStateFromRequest($this->context . '.featured', 'featured', '');

• The advantage of the above is that we can also pass the value as a GET param to the URL which helps us to make redirect URLs that can initialize the value of this dropdown
• $featured variable is used as a condition to manipulate the query to adjust to Featured

[C] Templates Merged

• We use state->get('featured') to conditonally render the template code as per featured or not.

[D] Views Merged

• We use state->get('featured') to conditonally render the toolbar options

[E] Controller Merged

• Merged the delete function from FeaturedController

Testing Instructions

• Visit the Articles View and ensure that everything works as it did before.
• Test workflows and filters too
• Ensure that the tmpl and view (and all other MVC files) are common for both featured and articles

Expected result AFTER applying this Pull Request

Everything works normally

[chmst]

About the menuItem "Featured Articles". Could we remove the link to featured articles from the backend? Or is it a b/c break ? Needs to be discussed

[YatharthVyas]

About the menuItem "Featured Articles". Could we remove the link to featured articles from the backend? Or is it a b/c break ? Needs to be discussed

Good Point.
I thought about this aswell and hence I planned to initialize the value of the featured selector drop-down using getUserStateFromRequest() because we can now pass a get Param to the URL as : index.php?option=com_content&view=articles&featured=1 to obtain the page for featured articles. We will simply have to update the URL for that menu item and everything will work normally