I'm modifying a pre-built theme to display 3 'featured posts' before the main grid of all posts on the index.php home page. I thought that the best way to do this was to do another loop before the main loop that queries posts with the category 'featured'. I need it to display the title of the post as well as the post categories in front of a background image of the post thumbnail.
However, when I use the_category(); the background …