Periscope – Custom Dashboard News Widget
Active Installs
30+
Last Updated
August 18, 2026
First Released
March 6, 2026
Download History (Last one month)
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?
Love the plugin? Please leave us a 5-star review and help spread the word!
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.
- Upload the
periscopiofolder to the/wp-content/plugins/directory - Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
- Go to Settings > Periscope to configure your feeds
- Visit your Dashboard to see the new widget
The default widget shows one feed. Periscope merges as many as you want into a single list ordered by date, so your agency blog, WordPress news and your client’s industry sources appear together, newest first. It also validates each feed, tracks whether it still works, lets you cap how many items each one contributes and adds your own announcements on top.
Yes. In Settings > Periscope > Announcements you can create messages with a title, a short text with basic HTML, an optional link, an optional expiry date and a notice style. They are shown at the top of the widget, above the news.
Pinned ones first. Then the ones with an expiry date, the soonest to expire first, because they are the most time sensitive. Then the rest, in the order you created them.
It stops showing in the widget that same day, but it stays in the settings, flagged as expired. Nothing is deleted behind your back: you can change the date to bring it back, reuse the text for something else, or remove it yourself.
Yes. In the widget settings you can pick which roles see it. Leave every role unchecked to show it to everybody, which is the default.
Another plugin is probably hiding it too. DietPress, for example, hides the same widget by default from Settings > DietPress > Widgets. Periscope tells you when it detects this, and turning its own option off is not enough as long as the other plugin is hiding it.
Yes, there’s an option in the settings to hide the default “WordPress Events and News” widget.
There’s no hard limit. However, adding too many feeds may slow down your dashboard. We recommend 5-10 feeds maximum. Each feed URL is validated before it can be added.
By default, feeds are cached for 12 hours. You can change this in the settings (1-72 hours), and the Refresh button really refetches every feed instead of serving the cached copy.
Yes. Both the events and news sections have configurable footer links (2 per section) that you can customize in the settings page.
Yes. All default URLs (feeds, footer links) are wrapped in translation functions so each locale can point to their own resources.
Everything is removed: settings, feeds, announcements, cached content and the location each user saved for the events section.
Changelog
1.1.2
- Improved: Tested up to WordPress 7.1
- Improved: A widget title or a set of footer links you write yourself can now be translated from WPML String Translation or Polylang, through the multilingual configuration the plugin ships
- Fix: The widget title and the footer links of both sections no longer get stuck in the language of whoever saved the settings. They were written to the database on the first save of the settings page, so on a multilingual site everyone who logged in read them in that one language, with the links pointing at the resources of that locale. They are resolved per reader again, and a stored copy of the bundled defaults is cleaned up on update. Wording you typed yourself is kept untouched, and an empty title or an empty list of links still means neither
1.1.1
- Fix: On screens that were not wide enough, the two columns of the settings page ran underneath the promotional sidebar and cut off part of the news and events boxes. The columns now follow the width really available, so the second one only appears when it fits
- Fix: An announcement with a long unbroken string in its title or message, a pasted URL being the usual case, overflowed the dashboard widget
- Fix: The settings page content was glued to the separator line under the tabs, with no space between them
1.1.0
- New: Announcements. Post your own messages at the top of the widget, with an optional link, an expiry date, pinning and a choice of notice style (the plugin colour or the four standard WordPress ones). They have their own settings tab, and are ordered with pinned first, then the ones expiring soonest. Turns the widget into a channel to reach the people who log into the site
- New: Role visibility. Choose which user roles see the dashboard widget
- New: Feed health. Each feed shows its last check, how many items it returned and the age of the latest one, so a dead feed no longer disappears silently
- New: Configurable number of events and filtering by meetup or WordCamp
- New: Filters for developers: periscopio_feeds, periscopio_items, periscopio_settings, periscopio_events_args, periscopio_announcements and periscopio_show_widget
- New: uninstall.php removes every option, cached item and stored user location when the plugin is deleted
- Improved: The Refresh button now really refetches the feeds. It used to clear only the plugin cache while WordPress kept serving its own copy for up to 12 hours
- Improved: The cache duration setting now applies to the WordPress feed cache too, so a shorter duration really shows news sooner
- Improved: Events are cached per location, so users in different cities no longer see each other’s events
- Improved: A failed request to the events API is reported as such instead of “No events found nearby”, and is not retried on every dashboard load
- Improved: Accessibility of the widget and the settings page: field labels, descriptive remove buttons, status messages announced to screen readers, real buttons with focus handling in the location bar
- Improved: Minimum WordPress version is now 6.0, matching the functions the plugin actually uses
- Improved: Promotional banner now shows AyudaWP services
- Fix: Relative dates were off by the site timezone offset, so a post published ten minutes ago could show as “2 hours ago”
- Fix: Feed items with no date showed as “55 years ago” and items dated in the future showed as if already published
- Fix: A single network glitch could freeze an empty widget for up to 72 hours, because the empty result was cached as if it were valid
- Fix: Titles containing ampersands or quotes were double escaped and rendered as “&”
- Fix: Removing every feed, or emptying the footer links, silently restored the default values on save
- Fix: The default events location is no longer hardcoded. Leave it empty and the API resolves it automatically
- Fix: The widget is no longer registered as an empty box when both sections are disabled
- Fix: Added a capability check and a throttle to the refresh handler, and a capability check to the location handler
- Fix: The “Settings saved” notice was shown twice, because the plugin printed its own on top of the one WordPress already prints
For older changelog entries, please check the changelog.txt file
