Pin Topic to a Tag

[Heliosurge (Dan DeMontmorency)]

Have you considered these 2 theme components

Homepage Feature Component

This is a theme component that features up to 3 topics with images on your community’s homepage [Screen Shot 2020-03-13 at 5.06.59 PM] By default the theme will feature the 3 most recent topics tagged featured and will pull in the first image from the topic. In the settings you can choose a custom tag, hide the tag, set a custom title, and configure where the component appears. [Screen Shot 2020-03-13 at 5.07.13 PM] On mobile it will only show one topic. [Screen Shot 2020-03-13 …

And

Featured Tiles Theme Component

A theme component which adds a row of featured tiles above topic lists: [Screenshot 2020-07-03 at 09.44.37] On hover, the topic title and author will be shown: [Screenshot 2020-07-03 at 09.43.52] There are lots of options available for selecting the topic source. Images can be fetched by tag, by category or by using a ‘top topics’ time period. Images can be scoped to the currently viewed category, or come from the entire site. A setting is added to the user interface preferences which all…

These might give some of the functionality your looking for.