“Live News” Documentation by “DAEXT” v2.18

“Live News”

Created: 07/12/2023
By: DAEXT
Email: support@daext.com

Thank you for using Live News. If you have any questions that are beyond the scope of this help file, please contact us with one of the methods described in our Support Page.

Table of Contents

  1. Video Tutorials
  2. Installation (Single Site)
  3. Installation (Multisite)
  4. Create a news ticker with manually added news
  5. Create a news ticker with news from the posts
  6. Create a news ticker with news from an RSS feed
  7. Create a news ticker with news from Twitter
  8. Performance
  9. Credits
  10. FAQ

A) Video Tutorials

This video series covers the functionalities of the Live News plugin.

Please note that not all the aspects and implications are covered in this section, it's recommended that you read the entire documentation (FAQ included) before using this plugin in a production environment or asking for support to the plugin author.

B) Installation (Single Site)

With this procedure you will be able to install the Live News plugin on your WordPress website.

  1. Visit the Plugins -> Add New menu
  2. Click on the Upload Plugin button and select the zip file you just downloaded
  3. Click on Install Now
  4. Click on Activate Plugin

C) Installation (Multisite)

This plugin supports both a Network Activation (the plugin will be activated on all the sites of your WordPress Network) and a Single Site Activation in a WordPress Network environment (your plugin will be activated on a single site of the network).

With this procedure you will be able to perform a Network Activation:

  1. Visit the Plugins -> Add New menu
  2. Click on the Upload Plugin button and select the zip file you just downloaded
  3. Click on Install Now
  4. Click on Network Activate

With this procedure you will be able to perform a Single Site Activation in a WordPress Network environment:

  1. Visit the specific site of the WordPress Network where you want to install the plugin
  2. Visit the Plugins menu
  3. Click on the Activate button (just below the name of the plugin)

D) Create a news ticker with manually added news

This procedure will guide you on the creation of a news ticker that make use of your manually added news:

  1. Visit the Live News -> News Tickers menu
  2. Enter the name of the news ticker in the Name input field
  3. Select where the news ticker should be applied with the Target select box
  4. Enter the URL where the news ticker should be applied with the Target URL input field (this value will be considered only if URL is selected in the Target select box)
  5. Open the Source section and select Manually Added in the Source select box
  6. Click the Add News Ticker button to create the news ticker

E) Create a news ticker with news from the posts

This procedure will guide you on the creation of a news ticker that make use of the titles, excerpts and permalinks of your posts:

  1. Visit the Live News -> News Tickers menu
  2. Enter the name of the news ticker in the Name input field
  3. Select where the news ticker should be applied with the Target select box
  4. Enter the URL where the news ticker should be applied with the Target URL input field (this value will be considered only if URL is selected in the Target select box)
  5. Open the Source section and select Posts in the Source select box
  6. Use the Category select box to determine if the news should be retrieved from all the posts or only from the posts of a specific category
  7. Click the Add News Ticker button to create the news ticker

F) Create a news ticker with news from an RSS feed

Before using an RSS feed please verify (by inspecting the RSS feed source code) that the following information are available:

This procedure will guide you on the creation of a news ticker that make use of the information available in an RSS feed:

  1. Visit the Live News -> News Tickers menu
  2. Enter the name of the news ticker in the Name input field
  3. Select where the news ticker should be applied with the Target select box
  4. Enter the URL where the news ticker should be applied with the Target URL input field (this value will be considered only if URL is selected in the Target select box)
  5. Open the Source section and select RSS in the Source select box
  6. Enter the URL of the RSS feed in the Source RSS input field
  7. Click the Add News Ticker button to create the news ticker

G) Create a news ticker with news from Twitter

If you plan to generate a news ticker based on the information provided by Twitter it's very important to note what follows:

Use Twitter as a source only with real web servers

Local development environment (like WAMP, XAMPP, etc.) are usually not properly configured to retrieve the information from Twitter. For this reason it's recommended to use Twitter as a source only on real web servers.

A Twitter App should be created to get the proper keys

To get the proper keys from Twitter (these keys are used by Twitter to identify who is sending the requests to their API) you have to follow this procedure:

  1. Create a Twitter App from this page
  2. In the Permissions tab keep the Access to Read Only (this plugin doesn't need to write or delete data)
  3. Visit the Keys and Access Tokens tab (you will be using the information available on this page during the configuration of of the news ticker)
Create the news ticker

  1. Visit the Live News -> News Tickers menu
  2. Enter the name of the news ticker in the Name input field
  3. Select where the news ticker should be applied with the Target select box
  4. Enter the URL where the news ticker should be applied with the Target URL input field (this value will be considered only if URL is selected in the Target select box)
  5. Open the Source section and select Twitter in the Source select box
  6. Enter the Twitter username for which you want to retrieve the tweets
  7. Enter the Twitter Oauth Access Token of your Twitter App
  8. Enter the Twitter Oauth Access Token Secret of your Twitter App
  9. Enter the Twitter Consumer Key of your Twitter App
  10. Enter the Twitter Consumer Secret of your Twitter App
  11. Click the Add News Ticker button to create the news ticker

In case you want to remove links from the retrieved tweets use the Twitter Strip Links option, to remove hashtags use the Twitter Strip Hashtags option and to remove usernames use the Twitter Strip Usernames option.

H) Performance

The Performance section available in the Live News -> News Tickers menu allows you to avoid common problems associated with the high number of AJAX requests required to retrieve the news.

Cached Cycles

This value determines the number of cycles performed by the news ticker without updating the news. If you set 10 then every 10 cycles the news will be updated with an AJAX request.

If you website is hosted on a shared hosting environment or if you have an high number of visitors you can reduce the number or requests sent by the news ticker to your server simply by increasing this value.

You can also decide to update the news at every cycle by setting the value of this option to 0, but this is not recommended in most cases.

Transient Expiration

With this option you can set the transient expiration in seconds or 0 if you don't want to use a transient for the news ticker.

A transient gives you the following advantages:

Please note the a transient is created when the news ticker is loaded for the first time or when the previous transient is expired. The transient of a news ticker will last for the number of seconds defined with the Transient Expiration option.

When a transient is available for a news ticker an icon will appear on the Live News -> News Tickers menu:

Click on the icon to delete the transient, this is required if you want to see the changes applied to a news ticker (that make use of a transient) actually reflected on the news ticker generated on the front-end.

I) Credits

This plugin makes use of the following resources:

For each library you can find the actual copy of the license inside the folder used to store the library files.

J) FAQ

A custom time format can be specified by using  the Source -> Clock Format option of the news ticker. The supported tokens are listed in the Format Section of the Moment.js documentation.

PHP 5.2.4 and later versions are supported.

WordPress 4.0 and later versions are supported.