SJ News is a WordPress plugin that adds a new widget directly to the WP Admin Dashboard with your custom news feed and a call to action button. I developed this WordPress plugin with freelancers and digital agencies in mind, specifically useful for those providing ongoing maintenance and support, offering a simple way to keep clients informed with your latest updates and announcements.
The plugin checks for new content every 15 minutes and caches the feed using transients, ensuring reliable performance. If your news source goes down, the cached version remains visible to avoid any disruption. You can set how many posts you’d like to fetch and display with the default of 3 for simplicity. To help reduce storage use, the number of posts you choose to display is also the number that gets cached. This keeps everything lightweight, efficient, and easy to manage.
To get started, you’ll need to provide a valid wp-json API URL pointing to your posts, for example: https://sjones.digital/wp-json/wp/v2/posts
For version 1 there is no separate admin settings page as all configuration is handled directly within your wp-config.php file. This decision was made purely due to the main target of this plugin. With future versions I may decide to include a settings page in WP Admin.
As mentioned, there is no WP Admin Settings or Options page, but you can configure everything from your wp-config.php file by adding the following before:/* That's all, stop editing! Happy publishing. */
E.g.define( 'SJNEWS_API_URL', 'https://sjones.digital/wp-json/wp/v2/posts' );define( 'SJNEWS_API_LIMIT', 3 );define( 'SJNEWS_WIDGET_TITLE', 'Latest Company News' );define( 'SJNEWS_EXTERNAL_LINK_URL', 'https://sjones.digital' );define( 'SJNEWS_EXTERNAL_LINK_TITLE', 'Visit Website' );/* That's all, stop editing! Happy publishing. */
WP Admin Dashboard custom news feed plugin installation
The WP Admin Dashboard custom news feed plugin, more simply named, “SJ News”, is available on Github right now, however, I may submit it to the official WP Plugin repository in the future and I may also release a Pro version with more features, so please check back for updates.
Download directly from Github, unzip the file and rename the folder to sjnews before moving it to your plugins directory.
Any questions, comments, or require WordPress support? Please contact me today and let’s work together.
