WordPress Plugins

Documentation and other information about our WordPress plugins.

News Aggregator

Real-time news for any website

Easily display real-time news by topic on your website. This plugin offers simple news aggregation feeds that can be displayed anywhere on your site. Choose a topic and easily display relevant and current news for your users.

News topics to choose from: Trending, Astronomy, Business, Culture, Economy, Entertainment, Environment, Food, Health, Investing, Lifestyle, Movies, Music, Personal Finance, Politics, Science, Sports, Technology, Travel, Weird, & World.

Implementation

Implementation of News is accomplished via a WordPress shortcode or with our News Aggregator widget. The defaults set above will be used unless any of the settings are defined within the shortcode or the widget itself.


Attributes

All five attributes listed above can also be specified case-by-case when using the shortcode: count, images, topic, style, & columns. Columns specifies how many columns you want to use to display the news items. For example, if you choose 1 for columns, the news items will be stacked in one column (possibly useful in a sidebar).

Available options (free plan)

Topic: Trending News only
Count: Any number between 2 & 8
Style: light or dark
Images: show or hide
Columns: 1, 2, 3, or 4

Available options (any other plan)

Topic: Trending, Astronomy, Business, Culture, Economy, Entertainment, Environment, Food, Health, Investing, Lifestyle, Movies, Music, Personal Finance, Politics, Science, Sports, Technology, Travel, Weird, World
Count: Any number between 2 & 8
Style: light or dark
Images: show or hide
Columns: 1, 2, 3, or 4


Widget

1) Navigate to Appearance -> Widgets.
2) Find the News Aggregator widget & drag or add it to the sidebar/area of choice.
3) Select options in the News Aggregator widget & click save.


Shortcode

Learn more: What are WordPress Shortcodes?


Example 1

Default display using the default settings.

[newsaggregator]


Example 2

Display with all five attributes defined.

[newsaggregator topic="technology" count="2" style="dark" images="show" columns="3"]


Example 3

Display only specifying some attributes, and using above defaults for the rest.

[newsaggregator topic="business" images="hide"]


Example 4

Display of eight Sports news items in a single column in the light theme.

[newsaggregator topic="sports" count="8" style="light" colums="1"]


Example 5

Implementation within a WordPress theme file.

echo do_shortcode('[newsaggregator topic="sports" count="4"]');

News Aggregator   On Github

Hoeboe

Deal with slow API calls and slow queries better.

Update WordPress transients in the background via AJAX to avoid long page load times. Hoeboe can be especially helpful with large external API calls or heavy internal database queries.

If you've used the WordPress Transients API, you already know how useful it can be with caching, page load, and site speed. If you've used transients to store data from external API calls or from heavy internal database queries, then you also know a few of its limitations. Namely, page load can be negatively impacted on the user session where a large transient gets updated.

Hoeboe helps to solve this problem of the one-off user who has to deal with potentially long page load while your site refreshes a transient in the background. With Hoeboe, you can choose to update those large transients in the background via AJAX. Your users won't notice anything different - other than possibly faster overall site speed.

See the example below detailing how to use Hoeboe in your theme.

Basic implementation of a Transient:

<?php
//WP_Query function to be used to get data
function my_function_to_get_featured_posts($category, $posts_per_page) {
    $posts = new WP_Query(
      array(
            "category" => $category,
            "posts_per_page" => $posts_per_page
      )
    );
    return $posts;
}

//Attempt to get transient
$transient_name = "foo_featured_posts";
$featured = get_transient( $transient_name );

//Check for transient. If none, then execute WP_Query function
if ( false === ( $featured ) ) {

    $category = "featured";
    $posts_per_page = "5";
    $featured = my_function_to_get_featured_posts($category, $posts_per_page);

    //Put the results of the query in a transient. Expire after 12 hours.
    $expiration_time = 12 * HOUR_IN_SECONDS;
    set_transient( "foo_featured_posts", $featured, $expiration_time );
} 
?>

Using Hoeboe with that same Transient outlined above:

<?php
//WP_Query function to be used to get data
function my_function_to_get_featured_posts($category, $posts_per_page) {
    $posts = new WP_Query(
      array(
            "category" => $category,
            "posts_per_page" => $posts_per_page
      )
    );
    return $posts;
}

$transient_name = "foo_featured_posts";
$my_function_name = 'my_function_to_get_featured_posts';
$category = "featured";
$posts_per_page = "5";
$my_function_parameters = array($category, $posts_per_page);
$transient_expire = 60;
$expiration_time = 12 * HOUR_IN_SECONDS;

if (class_exists('Hoeboe')) {
  $hoeboe = new Hoeboe();
  $transient_value = $hoeboe->hoeboe__updatetransient($transient_name, $my_function_name, $my_function_parameters, $expiration_time);
}
?>

Get Hoeboe   On Github