Live News – Real Time News Ticker

Live News is a WordPress plugin inspired from the news tickers used by broadcast television stations to communicate the latest news, financial news, weather warnings, election results, sport results etc.

This plugin updates the news with jQuery and AJAX in real time and your users will be able to see your latest news without updating the page.

News Manually Added

You can use the Featured News menu and the Sliding News menu to manually create the news of your news tickers. This allows you to have a complete control over the content of the displayed news and the maximum level of customizability on the sliding news. Feel free to select you favorite color for each sliding news and include custom image before and after each sliding news.

For example the news of the Sliding News with Stock Market Data demo page have been manually added, and the increase/decrease icons have been uploaded and associated with the sliding news.

News from WordPress

Use the WordPress posts as the source to create news tickers based on the titles, excerpts and permalinks of your posts (all the posts or only the posts of a specific category).

News from an RSS feed

With RSS as the source of your news you will be able to generate the news ticker based on the information included in your favorite RSS feed, which might be your own WordPress RSS feed, the RSS feed of a tv channel, the RSS feed of a radio, etc.

For example in the BBC News demo the news ticker is generated based on the news included in this RSS feed provided by BBC News.

Before importing content from an RSS feed please make sure that you are authorized to do so, the BBC News page used in the plugin demo is a non-indexed page created only for demonstration purposes.

News from Twitter

Use Twitter as the source of your news so you can show the latest tweets of your Twitter account to your visitors and increase the number of your follower.

Alternatively you can also decide display the tweets of other accounts, for example in the Sliding News from Pope Francis page the news ticker retrieves the news from the @Pontifex account.

Customize Everything

This plugin comes with 56 customizable options per news ticker, 4 options per featured news, 9 options per sliding news and 3 general options.

To give you an idea of the level of customizability consider that you will be able to:

• Apply the news ticker to the entire website or to a specific URL
• Temporarily enable or disable each news ticker
• Retrieve the news from your favorite source (Manually Added, WordPress posts, RSS feed, Twitter)
• Decide which category of posts should be considered (in case the WordPress posts are the source)
• Enter the username of the user for which you want to retrieve the tweets (in case Twitter is the source)
• Automatically remove links, hashtags and usernames from the tweets (in case Twitter is the source)
• Display the time based on the server time or on the user time, and also to assign a positive or negative offset
• Use the news ticker with LTR languages or also with RTL languages like Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu, etc.
• Enable or disable the news ticker with mobile devices
• Display or hide the featured news area (the big red area on top of the sliding news)
• Display the news ticker in open or closed status
• Enable or disable the links associated with the featured news title and with the sliding news
• Open the links in the same tab or in new tabs
• Show or hide the clock
• Set the update time of the clock
• Set the number of sliding news available for each cycle of news
• Set the speed of the sliding news
• Determine the number of cycles performed by the news ticker without updating the news
• Set the transient expiration in seconds
• Set the maximum length of the featured news title
• Set the maximum length of the featured news excerpt
• Set the maximum length of the sliding news
• Set the font size of the featured news title
• Set the font size of the featured news excerpt
• Set the font size of the sliding news
• Set the font size of the text displayed in the clock
• Set the margin between the sliding news
• Set the padding of the sliding news
• Enter a custom font family that will be used for all the textual elements of the news ticker
• Load a custom font family from Google Fonts
• Set the featured news title color
• Set the featured news title color in hover state
• Set the featured news excerpt color
• Set the sliding news color (for all the sliding news of a news ticker or also for specific sliding news if needed)
• Set the sliding news color in hover state (for all the sliding news of a news ticker or also for specific sliding news if needed)
• Set the background color of each sliding news
• Upload and choose an image displayed on the left of the sliding news
• Upload and choose an image displayed on the right of the sliding news
• Set the color of the text displayed in the clock
• Set the background color of the featured news area
• Set the background color opacity of the featured news area
• Set the background color of the sliding news area
• Set the background color opacity of the sliding news area
• Upload and choose a custom image for the open button
• Upload and choose a custom image for the close button
• Upload and choose a custom image for the background of the clock

Super Optimized

With the Live News plugin you are free to create an unlimited number of news tickers in websites hosted in shared servers, VPS or dedicated servers without any issue. This plugin make use of the WordPress Transients API, so you will be able to limit (based on your needs) the number of queries performed on your database to retrieve the news, the number of HTTP requests sent to the RSS sources and the number of requests sent to the Twitter API.

Controlling the number of requests sent to the provider of your news is very important because this allows you to avoid problems like exceeding the Twitter limits or having an RSS feed which refuses to responds to the server IP.

Multisite Ready

This plugin can be used on a WordPress Network, and supports both a Network Activation (the plugin will be activated on all the sites of your WordPress Network in a single step) and a Single Site Activation (your plugin will be manually activated on single sites of the network).

Multilanguage Ready

Live News comes by default in English and Italian, if you want to translate the plugin in another language simply create a translation file or manually translate it with a multilanguage plugin.

High Quality Support

Support for this plugin is provided in English and Italian directly via email by the plugin developer. If you experience any problems or if you need detailed technical info about specific plugin parts you are in good hands.

Documentation

The official plugin documentation, including references to the video tutorials and the FAQs, is available in the documentation page published on our website.

Credits

This plugin makes use of the following resources:

• Select2 licensed under the MIT License
• Twitter API PHP licensed under the MIT License
• Mobile Detect licensed under the MIT License
• The json2xml JavaScript function (available in the live-news/public/assets/js/general.js file) is licensed under the Creative Commons GNU LGPL License

For each library you can find the actual copy of the license inside the folder used to store the library files. The license information of the json2xml JavaScript function are available just above the function code.

Updates

07.12.2023 - v2.18
  - Restored the functionality of the "Hide Featured News" option
21.10.2023 - v2.17
  - The back-end menus are now optimized for RTL languages
  - Refactoring
05.08.2022 - v2.16
  - The "Import", "Export", and "Maintenance" menus have been added
  - Minor back-end improvements
  - New access control options have been added
16.05.2022 - v2.15
  - Added .pot file
10.03.2021 - v2.14
  - The "Target URL" option now supports multiple URLs
  - The "Target URL Mode" option has been added
  - The open/close button is now included in the news ticker when the featured news are not displayed
  - Minor back-end improvements
20.08.2020 - v2.11
  - Removed deprecated jQuery methods
19.12.2019 - v2.10
  - Fixed CSS issues caused by the changes applied in WordPress 5.3
31.07.2018 - v2.09
  - Improved the way transients are stored and parsed
29.07.2018 - v2.08
  - The "Twitter" source now supports 280 characters for the tweets
  - A custom time format can now be specified by using the "Clock Format" option of the news ticker
  - Other minor improvements
23.11.2017 - v2.05
  - Fixed a color picker style issue caused by style changes implemented in WordPress 4.9
  - The font family stack of WordPress is now used
  - Improved back-end style and functionalities
  - Added a search field on the Tickers, Featured News and Sliding News menus
  - Added the "Detect URL Mode" option
  - The "Sliding News Font Size" option has now the correct CSS specificity to be properly applied in the front-end
  - Updated the default values of the "Cached Cycles" (from 0 to 5) and "Transient Expiration" (from 0 to 60) ticker parameters
  - Other minor improvements
16.12.2016 - v2.04
  - The plugin has been rewritten with an OOP approach
  - Backend interface revamp
  - It's now possible to create multiple news tickers
  - The number of AJAX requests required to retrieve the news ticker data has been reduced from 3 to 1
  - The news ticker data can now be stored using the Transient API
  - It's now possible to set the number of cycles performed by the news ticker without updating the news
  - The news can now be retrieved from Twitter
  - Images can now be added before and after each sliding news
  - The Mobile Detect class has been updated
  - Multilanguage support has been added
  - Support for WordPress multisite
  - Many other options have been added and the overall number of options has been increased from 21 (v1.47) to 72 (v2.04)
14.03.2015 - v1.47
  - The Mobile Detect class has been updated
16.09.2014 - v1.46
  - The AJAX requests now use the WordPress native actions
  - Added an edit button in the Featured News menu and in the Sliding News menu
25.03.2014 - v1.45
  - Renamed the Mobile Detect class to avoid conflicts with other plugins that make use of the same class
13.09.2013
  - Initial release