Let editors pick the story that leads the homepage

[ssavutu]

Why

is_featured (the legacy priority column) has been in the article schema since the WordPress import, but it has never done anything. The ETL hardcodes it false on every row, no query orders by it, and Scalene has never referenced it on any branch. Editors asking how to set a featured article were right that there was no way to — the flag was inert end to end. All 43 articles on the live homepage currently carry is_featured: false.

Per the newsroom, featured means: the big centre card at the top of the homepage, which Scalene renders from news[0] in its 3-6-3 layout.

What it does

• Editor toggle — "Featured article" checkbox in the article sidebar, below Breaking news, wired through load / create / save / dirty-tracking. Help text says it replaces the current pick, since that's a side effect on somebody else's article.
• Cross-section — the article is spliced into the news block rather than sorted into the news query, because the featured story may be filed anywhere. A featured sports story still takes the lead card, which a news-scoped ORDER BY could never do. The block is re-trimmed to 13 so it doesn't outgrow the layout.
• Keeps its own slot — a featured sports story leads the homepage and stays in the sports rundown, the way a lead story does in print. Only the news block dedupes, so featuring a news story promotes it rather than printing it twice.
• Exclusive — featuring one article clears the flag on every other, on all three write paths (PATCH / PUT / POST). The homepage has one lead card; leaving the previous pick flagged would let the tiebreak, not the editor, decide which story runs. The clear runs after the target write succeeds, so a failed save leaves the old lead standing rather than leaving the homepage with none.
• Published only — drafts, scheduled and archived rows are skipped when resolving the lead. The flag alone must not put an unpublished headline on the front page.

No Scalene changes are required for this to work — sorting happens server-side and news[0] is already the lead card. The companion Scalene PR is only about cache freshness.

Cache freshness

/v1/homepage now states public, max-age=60, stale-while-revalidate=300. It previously sent no Cache-Control at all, so every intermediary applied its own heuristic and an editor swapping the lead had no bound on when readers would see it. 60s is short enough that a change shows on the next reload; stale-while-revalidate keeps that cheap under load.

Drive-by

TestTaxonomyAliasSeedAndCacheRoundTrip was failing on main. It pinned entertainment to exactly ["Arts & Entertainment"] and expected news to have no aliases — both invalidated by c0f2ae9 filing the remaining orphaned categories. It now derives expectations from defaultCategoryAliases (so filing more categories can't fail it), moves the no-defaults case off news to a guarded slug, and checks the HTML-escaping regression explicitly instead of via a comparison that shares a marshaller with the code under test.

Testing

• 5 unit cases for the splice, 4 integration tests against MariaDB — exclusivity, clearing, unpublished rows never leading, and an end-to-end one that features an older sports story and asserts the homepage leads with it.
• Verified by hand against the seeded dev corpus: featured a 2010 crew story, confirmed news[0] became it (is_featured: true, category Sports), block still 13, previous lead demoted to news[1], no duplication — then reverted and confirmed the original lead returned.
• Full server suite green, verified in a clean worktree of this commit. Frontend 12 tests + tsc clean.

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