Ok. I haven't really looked at this mod, but I've been asked to comment.
First, you've got a nice layout.
Second, you are probably testing each link to see if it's 'featured' rather than yanking all the featured links out of the category first.
Or, you are trying to sort with "isFeatured" first, and you are hitting the alt-link bug.
What you want is to generate the "featured" list as if it was a subcategory or related-category item.
Before you enter the processing of the category, you want to select all the "isFeatured" links for that category, and process them into a template variable "featured" or something like that, so you can do <%if featured%><%featured%><%endif%>
You only want to do this in the top block of the code for the first page of the output.
This is why the category processing subroutine first grabs the data, sees if we are spaning pages, and if we are, if we have more than one page, it builds page 1, then enters the build the rest of the pages loop.
This routine may look ungainly the first few times you go through it, but the reason is the first page of the category build is "different" from the rest of the pages due to the extra items you put at the top (related, subcats, etc). So, the routine first either builds one big page or just a page 1, then has a routine to loop through the rest of the data building any remaining pages.
You want to do the same thing, but just add the <%featured%> tag to the build routine after the <%subcategory%> and <%related%>
Make sense??
This may change in the next release. I have a feeling the program is going to be more of a set of widgets, and you string them together to do the work. In which case all the build routines are going to change, with more of the processing code in the .pm files, and only the structure code in the .cgi files. How much of that there is still remains to be seen :)
http://www.postcards.com FAQ:
http://www.postcards.com/FAQ/LinkSQL/