Local WordPress News in Dashboards

During the last polyglots chat a seldom known feature has been brought up – *WordPress in all languages can have the WordPress News widget in the Dashboard display news from local sites (like http://pl.wordpress.org).*

This wasn’t really documented anywhere AFAIK so *plase push this post to the handbook*. The 2 stringsString A string is a translatable part of the software. A translation consists of a multitude of localized strings. described below should also have comments added, which I ask anyone to do.

In every install of WordPress there’s a WordPress News widget in the Dashboard (you can show and hide it under the Screen Options), which always displays 1 expanded, most recent post from the 1st RSS feed source (by default: blog post from https://wordpress.org/news/) and 3 post titles from the 2nd RSS feed source (by default: blog posts from https://planet.wordpress.org/).

You can change both of those RSS feedRSS Feed RSS is an acronym for Real Simple Syndication which is a type of web feed which allows users to access updates to online content in a standardized, computer-readable format. This is the feed. URLs to fetch news from other sources, like your local WordPress website.

The 2nd site is a “Planet” service, which is an automatic aggregator of blog posts from various WordPress sites. It’s not very likely that you have a Planet set up for your language – if not, you can eighter create it or provide the same URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org for both sources, which results in 1 expanded post from that feed and – below – 3 most recent blog posts from the same feed (1st of which will be the same as the expanded one, but it’s the best option we’ve got). You can also set the 2nd feed URL to the English WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ blog, but then the expanded post will be in your local language, and 3 post titles that follow will be in English. It’s your call.

To set the feed URLs, go to https://translate.wordpress.org/ and navigate to your language. Then, you will see all currently maintained versions of WordPress. Do the following steps for *all versions:* click the title that represents a version -> Administration -> Filter -> type “feed” in the Term field -> click the Filter button -> scroll down to see 2 strings that are URLs of feeds.

*Note:* do NOT set the translation of these strings to an empty string, a space bar, a # sign or the URL of your local WordPress site (like http://pl.wordpress.org for Polish). Read on.

The original “https://wordpress.org/news/feed/” string is the 1st described feed source. The 1st post from it is displayed in the Dashboard widget, in an expanded fashion. You most likely want to set this to your local, official WordPress site feed URL. Navigate to your local WordPress site to discover this URL (you might need to search for it in the site’s source code in the head section). For Polish, the feed URL is https://pl.wordpress.org/feed/

The original “https://planet.wordpress.org/feed/” string is the 2nd described feed source. The 3 most recent post titles from it are displayed in the Dashboard widget. You can translate this string to any other RSS or Atom feed URL. You most likely want to consider using:

a Planet for WordPress feed in your language, if there is one,
the same URL as for the 1st feed source, so pointing to the local WordPress.org site feed,
the feed for the official English WordPress.org blog, which is: https://wordpress.org/news/feed/
leaving the English Planet URL feed as it was: https://planet.wordpress.org/feed/

Remember to change these for all current WordPress versions, as described above.

After approving the stringString A string is a translatable part of the software. A translation consists of a multitude of localized strings. change, wait about 12-24 hours for translation propagation. After you update your translation files in WordPress, see if it works. If you still see the news in English, wait another 12 hours for the caching mechanism to refresh that content.

Petya Raykovska 8:13 am on August 17, 2015

Thanks for the write up. I included it in the Handbook plan after the chat last week >> https://hackpad.com/Polyglots-handbook-suggested-edits-5kK1odaUYu9 and it will be added
Krzysztof Trynkiewicz (Sukces Strony) 9:02 am on August 17, 2015

Great, thanks 🙂
Xavier Borderie 3:48 pm on August 17, 2015

We’ve been doing it for YEARS in the French translation, so I’d like to add a word of advice: DO NOT point the feed link (either News or Planet) to your own site, unless it is sitting on a top notch server (and then some). W.org is hosted on many servers and thus can afford to have millions of website load their XML file, but you most probably don’t, and that will kill your server — trust me.

Hence, my suggestion: point to a proxy, such as FeedBurner or one of its alternative.

It would therefore be nice to see W.org’s Planet tool available for local W.org sites. I’ll pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” the team on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. 🙂
Krzysztof Trynkiewicz (Sukces Strony) 4:04 pm on August 17, 2015

Thanks for the pro tip, Xavier 🙂 I agree, with the numbers of WordPress translation downloads (can be seen in the RosettaRosetta The code name of the theme for the local WordPress sites (eg. bg.wordpress.org is a “Rosetta” site). All locale specific WordPress sites are referred to as “Rosetta sites.” The name was inspired from the ancient Rosetta Stone, which contained more or less the same text in three different languages. pages admin panel) it looks like a dedicated machine or a proxy is a must.
Milan Dinić 8:05 am on August 19, 2015

I am surprised that many weren’t aware of this, stringsString A string is a translatable part of the software. A translation consists of a multitude of localized strings. for it were obvious and I have been starting immediately. For main feed, I use one from localeLocale Locale = language version, often a combination of a language code and a region code, for instance es_MX denotes Spanish as it’s used in Mexico. A list of all locales supported by WordPress in https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/ site on w.org, but Planet is unchanged (not many resources in our language).

Also note that this only applies for new installation, once you install it you store feed addresses in options.
- Krzysztof Trynkiewicz (Sukces Strony) 9:06 am on August 19, 2015
  
  Um I’m pretty sure it’s not stored in the options or if the options value is set to default, it reverts to the URLs from the translation. I’ve pushed a translation update and the feed URLs switched for all my sites.
Nick Weisser 7:28 pm on August 19, 2015

Thanks for the write-up also from my side. I wasn’t aware of this either, but always wanted to include our https://de-ch.wordpress.org/ blog, which will hopefully also inspire other community members to write for the de_CH rosettaRosetta The code name of the theme for the local WordPress sites (eg. bg.wordpress.org is a “Rosetta” site). All locale specific WordPress sites are referred to as “Rosetta sites.” The name was inspired from the ancient Rosetta Stone, which contained more or less the same text in three different languages. site 😉

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Local WordPress News in Dashboards

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