Displays a list of RSS/Atom feed items given the feed URL and other parameters (optionals). Highly customizable.
It displays a list of feed items from a given feed URL. You can select cache recreation frequency, the number of displayable news and whether you want publication date, time (and in which format), an excerpt and reference to the plugin homepage displayed or not. You can also choose to have a ordered (numbered) or unordered (bullet-point) list and to open a new windows or not, when clicking on the linked items. You can truncate title and/or excerpt to a certain amount of chars and can sort the itmes by date/time or title.
Screenshots
Widget Form with default values
Shortcode with all the attributes in their default values
FAQ
RSS Just Better provides the latest items of any rss or atom feed on the Internet: can you imagine what traffic boost for your blog or website?
Do you want to know more about RSS or Atom feeds?
Check wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed
As a widget, you drag & drop the widget to any widget-ready area of your theme; open and complete the widget form and click on the ‘Save’ button. Close the widget if you want. Check your wp site now.
As a shortcode, choose the post or page you want your feed items to be displayed into, selecte HTML mode (IMPORTANT!) – and enter your shortcode as explained in Usage (in Other Notes).
ChangeLog
= 1.4
* Change: Change reference website which is now http://stefonthenet.com.
= 1.3
* New Feature: Possible to disable the reverse chronological order established by default. Normally, this results in a chronological order but not always. I.e. Google news will not be chronological.
* New Feature: Added “Serbia” to the list of Google News countries
* New Feature: Added “More Top News” to the list of Google News topics
* Change: Added more comments to code
* Change: Google News attributes for shortcode are now the same as for widget variables (to avoid confusion)
* Bug Fix: Non-latin alphabeths and non-standard chars (Google news locations) are now displayed properly
* Bug Fix: Image URL for rss icon in shortcode is now correct
* Bug Fix: Standard Google News feed URL has been changed (by Google)
* Bug Fix: Location as null string does not deafult to usa (??) (Google news)
* Bug Fix: urlencoding text for Google News searches
1.2 (never released)
- Change: If no feed item is returned, a message specifying how many items were requested is displayed
- Bug Fix: double quote works but do not show up
- Bug Fix: Local field/attribute (for Us and Ca only in English) did not work (var geo was local instead)
- Bug Fix: Feed linked to title did not work when feed was Google News feed.
1.1
- Bug Fix: Readme file was empty
- Bug Fix: plugin version in footer was 0.9 instead of 1.0 (now is 1.1)
1.0
- New Feature/Bug Fix: Date (weekdays & months) are now “localized” (=displayed in the language your wordpress is installed)
- New Feature: Given the possibility of displaying only items published by a given amount of hours (for infrequently updated feeds, * New Feature: Given the possibility of displaying Google News feeds given the new param: localization, topic or search keyword(s), local (for Us & Ca news only) it avoids showing always the same old items for a long time).
- Change: the preview of the excerpt on mouse-over is disabled if the excerpt is ticked-off (widget)/set to TRUE (shortcode)
- Change: improved documentation about n. of items to be displayed: reminded that setting a value of 0 will return the total number of items in the feed.
- Bug Fix: fixed path to rss image from ‘../RSS-just-better/..’ to ‘../rss-just-better/..’ (thanks Mike)
0.9 (UNRELEASED)
- New Feature/Bug Fix: Date (weekdays & months) are now “localized” (=displayed in the language your wordpress is installed)
0.8
- New Feature: Being able to truncate/limit the title to (given) chars
- New Feature: Being able to choose the date format
- New Feature: Being able to choose the time format
- New Feature: Being able to sort the feed items by title (instead of the default date/time)
- Change: “Link to author” in widget form becomes “Link to the Plugin Homepage”
- Change: the popup window showing on mouseover title is limited to 400 char
- Change: optimized function to retrieve feed and format list
- Change: Changed error message when feed URL is not right: its more likely a temp fault of the hosting server (especially if it has already worked before than not a malformed feed
- Bug Fix: fixed the plugin homepage URI in readme.txt file
0.7
- Bug Fix: The […] in the excerpt linked to the description and not to the URL of the linked item/article [Thx ]
- Bug Fix: “Num. of News” in widget form becomes “No. of Items”
- Bug Fix: Fixed the shortcode example in readme.txt as contained syntax errors [Thx Wayne]
- Bug Fix: The strings for titles and excerpts were not properly formatted for display on screen [Thanks Mary Ann]
- Change: Improved documentation for page Other Notes
0.6
- New feature: the user is able to set the cache refresh time both in the widget form and the shortcode
- Change: Replaced old email address (mywizardwebs@) with new (stefonthenet@)
- Change: Added the plugin version number in the “Powered from” line at the botton
- Change: Author URI, Plugin URI added to readme.txt file
- Change: Improved description of sample shortcode
- Fixed bug: Boolean variables were not properly tested and caused some inconsistent views when the plugin was used as a shortcode
0.5
- Added attribute “filter” to include or exclude given words
- Changed footer’s author link to the plugin homepage
- Set attribute Charex default value to 150 so that if excerpt is true, an excerpt is automatically displayed (for 150 chars).
- Changed attribute num default value to 5
- Enclosed shortcode in a class (it seems attribute feed collided with wordpress since 3.2)
0.4
- Made Date & Time formats (when selected) as those defined in wordpress settings page
- Made linkable title opening in new/same window according to widget selection
- Added attributed “title” and “link” to shortcodes too
- Made link for title as an image to an RSS cube
- Used fetch_feed as feed farser function (the other was not compatible with all the PHP server installations)
- Made code DHTML compatible (hopefully)
0.3
- Made it fully compatible with Atom 1.0
- Added proper error messages for: empty, non-existing URLs and invalid/misformatted feeds content
- Added defaults for target and list (widget fields)
- Added instruction to hide Warnings from the xmlsimple_load_file function
- Fixed a bug which prevented proper display of description/summary with tags
0.2
- Fixed a bug which prevented the shortcode to show feeds from URLs containing & and =
- Made it fully compatible with RSS version 0.92, 2.0, 2.0.1 where link and title might be omitted
- Made the widget title linkable to the feed URL
- Used the native PHP class simpleXML instead of the WordPress feed parser (Magpie)
0.1
- First release. Originating from google-news-widget plugin