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When creating hero sliders or similar components, it’s often helpful to exclude blog posts that don’t have a featured image attached. Fortunately, Laravel makes this easy. Here's a simple query that works in Laravel 6 (the version used in OctoberCMS v2):

```php
$query = \RainLab\Blog\Models\Post::with(['categories', 'featured_images'])
    ->withCount('featured_images')
    ->where('featured_images_count', '>', 0);

$posts = $query->listFrontEnd([
	'page'             => 1,
	'sort'             => 'published_at desc',
	'perPage'          => 10,
	'published'        => true,
});
```

## Using the Query in Your Template

The result stored in `$posts` can be passed to your template layout or CMS page, either in the `onInit` or `onStart` function. However, you may notice that the post URLs are missing. This happens because we need to set them manually. Here’s a solution to ensure each post has a URL:

```php
##
url = "/test"
description = "Example Template"
==
<?php 
function onStart()
{
    $query = \RainLab\Blog\Models\Post::with(['categories', 'featured_images'])
        ->withCount('featured_images')
        ->where('featured_images_count', '>', 0));
				
    // Select posts
    $posts = $query->listFrontEnd([
        'page'             => 1,
        'sort'             => 'published_at desc',
        'perPage'          => 10,
        'search'           => null,
        'category'         => null,
        'published'        => true,
    ]);

// Get component details
    if (!empty($component = $this->layout->getComponent('blogPosts'))) {
        $postPage = $component->property('postPage');
        $categoryPage = $component->property('categoryPage');
    }
    $ctrl = $this->controller;
    $postPage = empty($postPage) ? 'blog/post' : $postPage;
    $categoryPage = empty($categoryPage) ? 'category/post' : $categoryPage;

// Set on each post and category
    $posts->each(function($post) use ($ctrl, $postPage, $categoryPage) {
        $post->setUrl($postPage, $ctrl);
        $post->categories->each(fn ($item) => $item->setUrl($categoryPage, $ctrl)); 
    });

// Pass to template
    $this['featuredPosts'] = $posts;
}
?>
==

```

## Bonus: Extending the Query with BlogHub

For our upcoming Falcon template, we extended this query to allow the user to set either a `featured_image` or a custom `slider_image` meta field. This is achieved using our [BlogHub](https://octobercms.com/plugin/ratmd-bloghub) extension for OctoberCMS. To ensure that either a `featured_image` or a `slider_image` is available, the query is adjusted as follows:

```php
$query = \RainLab\Blog\Models\Post::with(['categories', 'featured_images', 'ratmd_bloghub_meta'])
    ->withCount('featured_images')
    ->where(function ($builder) {
        $builder->where('featured_images_count', '>', 0);
        $builder->orWhere(function ($builder) {
            $builder->whereHas('ratmd_bloghub_meta', function ($builder) {
                $builder->where('ratmd_bloghub_meta.name', 'slider_image')
                        ->whereNotNull('ratmd_bloghub_meta.value');
            });
        });
    });
```

To include the `slider_image` field in your blog posts, install the BlogHub extension and add the following code at the bottom of your `theme.yaml` file:

```yaml
ratmd.bloghub:
    post:
        slider_image:
            tab: Custom Meta
            type: mediafinder
            mode: image
            label: A special image used for sliders only.
            maxItems: 1
```

Now, you can output the `slider_image` as follows:

```html
<img src="{{ post.bloghub.meta.slider_image | media }}" alt="..." /> 
```

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