Workshopshed

<p>The RSS Feed checker looks through your blogroll for links with rss feeds and then stores the name and url of the latest article.<br />
The Links RSS Enhanced widget then displays the latest links in descending order.<br />
The idea for the widget comes from the blogroll widget on blogger.</p>
<h3>Technical section</h3>
<p>The plugin will create an extra table in your wordpress database to store the latest feed updates,<br />
this will be called links_rss with the prefix for your database e.g. wp_links_rss</p>
<p>A Cron (schedule) is created to run every 30 minutes and process links. Note that Cron in WordPress<br />
depends on hits, your WordPress website receives. So playing with this plugin within an offline<br />
environment (MAMP, XAMPP, WAMP etc.) without anyone or anything triggering the scheduling by<br />
sending requests to the WordPress page won’t produce any results if you do not trigger it by<br />
yourself.</p>
<h3>References</h3>
<p>A selection of places I’ve found help for this plugin.</p>
<p>Thanks also to Ozh, Roland Rust and for their explainations and examples</p>
<h4>Admin UI</h4>
<ul>
<li>https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/add_meta_box</li>
<li>https://codex.wordpress.org/Administration_Menus#Page_Hook_Suffix</li>
<li>http://wpengineer.com/1295/meta-links-for-wordpress-plugins/</li>
<li>http://www.code-styling.de/english/how-to-use-wordpress-metaboxes-at-own-plugins</li>
<li>http://planetozh.com/blog/2008/02/wordpress-snippet-add_meta_box/</li>
<li>http://wptheming.com/2011/08/admin-notices-in-wordpress/</li>
<li>http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/improving-security-in-wordpress-plugins-using-nonces</li>
</ul>
<h4>Ajax</h4>
<ul>
<li>http://return-true.com/2010/01/using-ajax-in-your-wordpress-theme-admin/</li>
<li>http://amiworks.co.in/talk/simplified-ajax-for-wordpress-plugin-developers-using-jquery/</li>
<li>http://xplus3.net/2008/10/16/jquery-and-ajax-in-wordpress-plugins-administration-pages/</li>
<li>http://www.garyc40.com/2010/03/5-tips-for-using-ajax-in-wordpress/</li>
</ul>
<h4>Database</h4>
<ul>
<li>http://createmy.com.au/connecting-your-plugin-to-the-wordpress-database/</li>
<li>http://webjawns.com/2009/08/the-wordpress-wpdb-class-explained/</li>
</ul>
<h4>Scheduling</h4>
<ul>
<li>http://wpseek.com/source/wp/latest/nav.html?wp-includes/cron.php.html</li>
<li>Ideas on background processing from the broken link checker</li>
</ul>
<h4>Settings</h4>
<ul>
<li>https://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_API – new way to handle options/settings         </li>
<li>http://ottopress.com/2009/wordpress-settings-api-tutorial/</li>
<li>http://planetozh.com/blog/2009/05/handling-plugins-options-in-wordpress-28-with-register_setting/</li>
<li>http://wpengineer.com/2139/adding-settings-to-an-existing-page-using-the-settings-api/</li>
<li>http://blog.gneu.org/2010/09/intro-to-the-wordpress-settings-api/</li>
<li>http://alisothegeek.com/2011/01/wordpress-settings-api-tutorial-1/</li>
</ul>
<h4>RSS Feeds</h4>
<ul>
<li>http://jaewon.mine.nu/jaewon/2010/10/30/how-to-make-your-wordpress-a-rss-reader/</li>
<li>https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Filter_Reference/wp_feed_cache_transient_lifetime</li>
<li>http://simplepie.org/</li>
</ul>


RSS Feed Checker

The RSS Feed checker looks through your blogroll for links with rss feeds and then stores the name and url of the latest article.

Guido

<h4>About</h4>
<p>With this lightweight plugin you can display a set of links from the Link Manager.</p>
<p>The Link Manager is part of WordPress but disabled by default. This plugin will activate it again.</p>
<p>To display your link list you can use a block, a shortcode or a widget.</p>
<p>You can customize your link list with attributes.</p>
<p>With this plugin you can also create a blogroll or link portal in the same way as a link list.</p>
<h4>How to use</h4>
<p>After installation go to menu item “Links”. You can add your categories and links here. Links must be assigned to a category.</p>
<p>Add the VS Link Manager block or the shortcode <code>[links]</code> to a page to display your link list.</p>
<p>Or go to Appearance > Widgets and use the VS Link Manager widget.</p>
<p>Default settings categories:</p>
<ul>
<li>4 columns when using block or shortode</li>
<li>1 column when using widget</li>
<li>Order by name</li>
<li>Ascending order (A-Z)</li>
<li>Empty categories are hidden</li>
</ul>
<p>Default settings links:</p>
<ul>
<li>Order by name</li>
<li>Ascending order (A-Z)</li>
<li>All links are displayed</li>
</ul>
<p>You can customize your link list with attributes.</p>
<h4>Attributes</h4>
<p>You can customize your link list by adding attributes to the block, the shortcode or the widget.</p>
<ul>
<li>Add custom CSS class to link list: <code>class="your-class-name"</code></li>
<li>Change the number of columns: <code>columns="3"</code></li>
<li>Disable the columns: <code>columns="0"</code></li>
<li>Include certain categories: <code>include="1,3,5"</code></li>
<li>Exclude certain categories: <code>exclude="8,10,12"</code></li>
<li>Display empty categories too: <code>hide_empty="0"</code></li>
<li>Display category description: <code>category_description="true"</code></li>
<li>Change the number of links per category: <code>links_per_category="5"</code></li>
<li>Reverse the order of links: <code>order="DESC"</code></li>
<li>Display links by ID: <code>orderby="ID"</code></li>
<li>Display links in random order: <code>orderby="rand"</code></li>
<li>Hide link title: <code>hide_link_title="true"</code></li>
<li>Hide link description: <code>hide_link_description="true"</code></li>
<li>Change feed label: <code>feed_label="your label"</code></li>
<li>Change the “no categories are found” text: <code>no_categories_text="your text"</code></li>
</ul>
<p>Example: <code>[links include="1,3,5" category_description="true" links_per_category="5"]</code></p>
<p>When using the block or the widget, don’t add the main shortcode tag or the brackets.</p>
<p>Example: <code>include="1,3,5" category_description="true" links_per_category="5"</code></p>
<p>With the columns attribute you can set the number of columns between 1 and 4.</p>
<p>The link list becomes 2 columns in small screens (except when number of columns is set to 1).</p>
<p>You can also disable the columns. This can be handy if you only want to use your own styling.</p>
<p>The columns attribute will be ignored when using the block or widget. Because you can set the columns via the block or widget settings.</p>
<p>With the hide link title attribute you can hide the link title if the link has an image assigned to it. This way you can display the link image only, instead of both.</p>
<h4>Widget</h4>
<p>This plugin activates the Links widget again. Because this widget is part of WordPress, plugin has no control over it.</p>
<p>You can use the VS Link Manager widget instead.</p>
<h4>Have a question?</h4>
<p>Please take a look at the FAQ section.</p>
<h4>Translation</h4>
<p>Translations are not included, but the plugin supports WordPress language packs.</p>
<p>More <a href="https://translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp-plugins/very-simple-link-manager" rel="nofollow ugc">translations</a> are very welcome!</p>
<p>The translation folder inside this plugin is redundant, but kept for reference.</p>
<h4>Credits</h4>
<p>Without help and support from the WordPress community I was not able to develop this plugin, so thank you!</p>


VS Link Manager

With this lightweight plugin you can display a set of links from the Link Manager.

RSS Feed Checker vs VS Link Manager