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New WordPress plugin: newsPage

New WordPress plugin: newsPage

This past week, I redid the design for QuickPipe.com, and one of the things I wanted to add was an Industry News section.

I thought about just making a page that was part of the template, but then I decided that I wanted to control the RSS feeds from the backend, so that began my work on this new plugin.

newsPage is an RSS feed aggregator much like PopUrls or AllTop, two pretty popular web sites. This topic has been looked at before by lots of websites and it wasn’t something I was trying to repeat. What I was trying to repeat, was the idea of being able to give people a way to quickly turn sections of their blogs into news aggregation pages.

You could easily use this plugin to make a website similiar to PopUrls, or you could use it to make a page that has all your industry news.

There’s some more functionality I’ll be adding later, but this is the initial beta release, and it’s one I’m pleased with so far.

View demo download files

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This post was written by who has written 384 posts on Roger Stringer.

Roger Stringer is a web developer, writer and editor with over 10 years of experience in web development. Roger Stringer is the founder of sites such as TheInterviewr and DBStract and is the editor of sites such as FoodJumper, Foodizu and Attack Of Code.

20 Responses to “New WordPress plugin: newsPage”

  1. Rand March 3, 2009 at 5:41 am #

    Very nice plugin, had no problems getting it installed and running, it seems to integrate nicely with my theme to. I was wondering how to control the description boxes that pop up when hovering over the links?

    Made my day, been having trouble with plugins lately, yours was a breeze to work with.

    Rand

    • Roger Stringer March 3, 2009 at 6:49 pm #

      Thanks :)

      I kept it simple, so the description boxes are handled by 2 lines in the newspage.css file.

      “.feeditem a span” and “.feeditem a:hover span”

      I may switch that to jquery later, but for now, I wanted to keep things simple.

  2. Erik March 4, 2009 at 4:04 am #

    Hello.

    First of all thanks for the plugin.

    I was wondering how to get the news link to open in a new page when clicking on it?

    Thanks

    • Roger Stringer March 4, 2009 at 7:29 am #

      It’s on my list to include it as an option in the next release (new window or no), but for now, if you open newsblocks.php, and go to line 71 and line 90, you can edit the “<A href” code to open in a new window.

      Replace “<a href” with “<a target=’_blank’ href” instead. :)

      • Erik March 7, 2009 at 3:09 pm #

        Thank for the answer.
        It is possible some how to be able to have more then one news page?

        • Roger Stringer March 7, 2009 at 9:53 pm #

          In what way?

          You can now add the newspage tag on as many pages as you want.

          The next version, which is being tested now, will let you actually specify tags for each feed, and then display feeds based on that tag so you can create multiple newspages

  3. Dr. Strangelove March 8, 2009 at 9:03 am #

    Great plugin — been looking ofr days for a solution like this — well done — THANKS!

  4. Scott March 20, 2009 at 4:16 pm #

    Roger,
    Thank you! This is a great plug-in!

    I have one question, however. Where can I control how many characters are displayed from a feed?

    • Roger Stringer March 20, 2009 at 10:20 pm #

      It’s currently specified at line 23 of the “newsblocks.php” file. But it’s on the todo list for the next update (1.7), to be controlled from the backend, along with a few other items.

      • Scott March 21, 2009 at 10:01 am #

        Awesome. Thanks for the help!

      • Joel October 23, 2009 at 6:03 am #

        Awesome plugin. It was just what I was looking for. I’ve tried to change the character length. From the default “200″ to “20″ and it doesn’t look like anything changed.

        Do I have some other setting overriding it?

        • Roger Stringer October 27, 2009 at 10:13 pm #

          Open up newsblocks.php, and look for $length = 200;, change that to 20 and it will work.

  5. Rick September 21, 2009 at 11:12 pm #

    Excellent plug-in but was wondering if the following could be implemented and if so how:

    1) Justify the block text & mouse-over text to be equally padded on both sides.
    2) Enable/Disable the feeds fav.icon Only because some of the feeds are missing their site’s icon.
    3) A way to display individual feeds instead of using the widget? It’s really for formating and how and where the feed is located. Example, a total of 10 feeds and 5 of those feeds are separated by a tag.

    Thanks

    • Roger Stringer September 22, 2009 at 6:49 pm #

      1) you’ll have to play with the stylesheet.
      2) That would be in newsblocks.php, around line 69
      3) That could be done by using the topics, assign a topic or tag to different feeds and then display only feeds for that topic.

  6. Rick September 23, 2009 at 5:55 pm #

    Excellent thanks, I got the first two done but the last step I was unable to do. I already tried to do this:

    This works fine but shows all my feeds:

    This does not work:

    And this does not work either:

    I tried several other ways but the topic itself does not show up. Btw, the “Show List of Topics at bottom of newspage?” is set to “No”. Is there something that I did wrong or is there another way of doing this?

    Thanks

    • Roger Stringer September 23, 2009 at 5:59 pm #

      Not sure what you said you tried (code apparently got cut out), but if you try this on a page:

      [newstopics limit=5 topic=”web design”]

      where “web design” is the name of the topic, then that would show only feeds that are designated as web design.

  7. Jonathan Collier January 26, 2010 at 7:51 pm #

    Hi Roger, Just to say great plugin and thanks. Cheers, Jonathan.

  8. Jim March 1, 2010 at 2:26 am #

    Will this work with the Thesis Theme?

  9. planetMitch August 10, 2010 at 3:48 pm #

    Just wanted to pop in and say thanks. I added this quite easily to my blog and like the way it works so far.

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