Periscope – Custom Dashboard News Widget
Every plugin that touches the WordPress dashboard lets you remove widgets. Periscope is about what you put in their place.
It replaces the default ”WordPress Events and News” widget with your own: as many RSS feeds as you want, merged into a single list and sorted by date, plus nearby WordPress community events and your own announcements for the people who log into the site.
That merge is the point. Swapping the news feed of the default widget for another single feed is a two-line snippet. Combining your agency blog, your favourite WordPress sources and your client’s industry news into one widget, with URL validation, per feed limits, cache control and a real settings page, is what Periscope does.
Built for agencies and freelancers
If you build sites for other people, the dashboard is the first thing they see:
- Announcements: post a message at the top of the widget, with an optional link and expiry date. Tell your clients about scheduled maintenance, a new feature or anything they should know, without sending an email.
- Role visibility: choose which roles see the widget, so your clients get it and other users do not.
- Feed health: see at a glance which feeds are working, how many items they return and how old the latest one is. Dead feeds no longer disappear silently.
Features
- Aggregate unlimited RSS feeds into one widget, merged and sorted by date
- URL validation before a feed is added, with feed title and item count
- Per feed health status: last check, items collected, age of the latest item
- Your own announcements at the top of the widget, with optional link, expiry and pinning
- Show the widget only to the roles you choose
- WordPress community events with per user location, configurable count and meetup or WordCamp filtering
- Option to hide the default ”WordPress Events and News” widget
- Configurable items per feed and maximum items displayed
- Configurable footer links for both sections
- Feed caching with configurable duration and a refresh button that really refetches
- Filters for developers to preconfigure everything from code
- Clean, native WordPress admin styling with a two-column settings page
- Fully translatable, including URLs so each locale can point to its own resources
Works alongside your dashboard plugin
Periscope only touches one widget, the news one. It coexists with plugins that customize or clean the rest of the dashboard, such as Ultimate Dashboard, White Label CMS or DietPress: use them for the structure, use Periscope for the content.
For developers
Everything can be driven from code with filters: periscopio_feeds, periscopio_items, periscopio_settings, periscopio_events_args, periscopio_announcements and periscopio_show_widget.
Default Feeds
The plugin comes pre-configured with these feeds (you can change them):
- WordPress News (wordpress.org)
- Matt Mullenweg’s blog (ma.tt)
- Make WordPress Project
- WordPress España News
- AyudaWP
External services
This plugin connects to the following external services:
WordPress.org Events API
This plugin uses the WordPress.org Events API to retrieve WordPress community events (meetups, WordCamps) near the user’s location. The user’s configured location and locale are sent to the API when the dashboard widget is loaded or when the location is updated in the settings page.
- Service: WordPress.org Events API
- Data sent: city/location name, user locale, and timezone
- WordPress.org Privacy Policy
RSS feeds
This plugin fetches RSS feeds from URLs configured by the site administrator. By default it includes feeds from wordpress.org, ma.tt, make.wordpress.org, and ayudawp.com, but administrators can add, remove, or change feeds in the settings page. Feed content is cached locally for the configured cache duration.
- Data sent: standard HTTP requests to the configured feed URLs
- No personal user data is transmitted to the feed providers
Support
Need private support or custom development?
Do you need one-on-one help, priority troubleshooting, or a custom feature, integration, or tweak built specifically for your site? I offer private support and custom development. Just contact me and tell me what you need.
Need help or have suggestions?
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About AyudaWP
We are specialists in WordPress security, SEO, and performance optimization plugins. We create tools that solve real problems for WordPress site owners while maintaining the highest coding standards and accessibility requirements.