News Feed Panel

About the News Feed Panel

The News Feed panel displays a “feed” from a series of WordPress posts published on a Boise State website. If your college or department creates your own news posts, you can use the News Feed panel to display posts from your own site.

You can also use the News Feed panel to display posts from Boise State’s News site. This is a great option for site administrators to display fresh, updated content without having to write and publish posts.

If you would like to feature news from your own site as well as from www.boisestate.edu/news, this can be accomplished using two separate News Feed panels, one for each source of posts.

Avoid Duplicate Content

For the best user experience and search engine optimization, avoid duplicate content on boisestate.edu. Do not copy the content of posts on www.boisestate.edu/news and use it create the same post on your own site. Having two identical posts on our site can cause confusion for users and search engines and could dilute the link equity for both posts. Instead of recreating an identical post on your own site, use the News Feed panel to link to the post in its original location.

News Feed Panel Guidelines

• In order for images to appear correctly in the News Feed panel, your source posts must have a Featured Image using the optimal image size of 664px x 664 px.
• The News Feed panel, along with the proper configuration of source posts, may require information that is difficult for admins or authors to obtain, so we encourage you to consult with WordPress Support for assistance with this panel.
• Follow all Image and Media Requirements and Best Practices.
• Review the Recommendations for Accessible Panels page to learn more about requirements for headings, images, links, and media published in this panel.
• Use of this panel for an undocumented purpose or in a non-standard way is discouraged and may not be supported.

How to Configure the News Feed Panel

• In the WordPress editor, select Add a New Panel or Live Preview.
• Select the “News Feed” panel.
• Title: This is a text field. Content entered here will appear as the panel header text.
• Link: This is an optional series of fields allowing you to display a link to all of your posts, rather than just a handful of the most recent. Enter your Posts page URL, and what you’d like the link text to be. This link will display above your news feed items in the panel at top-right.
• Data Source: Select the type of feed source you wish to use – JSON Feed, RSS Feed or Local Posts.

JSON and RSS Feeds

You can use a JSON or RSS feed to display posts from another site, including www.boisestate.edu/news. Please contact the OIT Help Desk for assistance configuring the News Feed panel with an RSS or JSON feed.

Local Posts

Local posts are posts on your own WordPress site. You can choose to manually select posts to display in your News Panel, or dynamically show published posts in chronological order.

• Manual: This option allows you to specifically choose which posts you’d like to appear on the panel. Click “Select a Post,” select the first dropdown and click “Posts.” Type the title of post to add, or type a search term/keyword for that post to see a list of possible matches via autocomplete. You can re-order posts by clicking and dragging the posts to your desired order.
• Dynamic: This option will dynamically pull recently-published posts into the panel and display them in descending order based on creation date. Click on first dropdown and select “Posts.” You can filter Posts by categories, tags or date.

Settings

• Custom Language: Language options that will generate markup signifying that content as being in the selected language.
• Presentation: Choose a 2, 5 or 7 tile presentation, or a list view. Note that the post title in each tile will be marked as a heading and will be read out to assistive technology users who are scanning through the headings on the page. Perform a review of all the headings on your page to make sure the headings are easily scannable and that all users can quickly access the most relevant and important content on your page.
• Title Color: The default selection is black. Your choices are black, orange or blue. This selection determines the Panel Title color.