How to Use the Widget Customization Options

Once you have added the WP RSS Aggregator Widget to your theme as explained here, follow the steps below to customize its look and feel.

These settings control the basic view options for your widget. The options in this section are identical to the options available when using the [wp-rss-aggregator] shortcode.

Open links in new tab

When ticked, this option will make links in the widget open in a new browser tab, so that your visitors will retain a tab open with your site.

This option is ticked by default. You can choose to untick it, if for example, you are showing feed items with links for navigational purposes, to make the links change the page in the same browser tab.

Show Date

This option allows you to toggle the date of the feed item on or off. When ticked, the published date of the feed item will be shown beneath the feed item.

Note that in some rare cases when the feed source does not specify the date for feed items, WP RSS Aggregator will use the date the item was imported, so your feeds will always have a date available.

Show Author

This option allows you to choose whether or not the authors for feed items are shown, much like the Show Date option. When the checkbox is ticked, the author is shown underneath the feed item, next to the feed item’s date (if the Show Date option is also enabled).

Note that if the feed source does not specify who the author of the feed item is, it will not be shown.

Feed Item Count

This option allows you to control how many feed items to include in the widget.

The widget acts as a list, so think of this option as a control for the number of items in the list, much like the Feed display limit option in the Display Settings section in the plugin’s General Settings page.

Trim title

If your feed items have long titles that span over multiple lines, you can choose to make them shorter by setting the number of characters (letters) using this option. Any titles that are longer than the number given for this option are limited to the given number and will have “…” added.

Use 0 (zero) for no title trimming. This is also the default value for this option.

For example, if the option is set to 15 characters, the title “News update” will remain the same (since it is 11 characters long) but the title “New WordPress version available” will be trimmed as “New WordPress V…“.

These settings only come into effect if the Excerpts & Thumbnails add-on is installed. This is because the features here require information from the feed item (such as the excerpt, excerpt length, thumbnail, etc.) that is only imported when the add-on is installed and activated.

Show Excerpt

Tick this option if you wish to show the excerpt for the feed items if the excerpt is given by the feed source. This will show the excerpt below the feed item’s title and above the date or author if the Show Date and Show Author options are enabled.

Trim Excerpt and Read more text

These two options allow you to limit the length of the excerpts shown for feed items while also providing a link to the full feed item content.

The Trim Excerpt option is very similar to the Trim Title option, except that it takes a number of words. Any excerpt that has more words than the given number will be trimmed to only consist of that given number of words. Use 0 (zero) if you do not wish to trim excerpts. This is also the default value for this option.

If an excerpt is trimmed, the Read more text option comes into play. This option allows you to set a link that visitors can click to view the original feed item, similar to clicking on the feed item title. The default value for this option is “[Read more]“.

The above image demonstrates how the two options work together. In this example, we are using 15 words for Trim Excerpt and “Continue Reading” for Read more text.

Show Thumbnail

This option allows you to enable the display of the feed item’s thumbnail in the widget. The thumbnail used is the one imported by the Excerpts & Thumbnails add-on, which means that if no thumbnail is given by the feed, no thumbnail will be shown.

The thumbnail will be shown above the feed item’s title, similar to featured images for posts.

By default, this option is disabled.

In this section, you will find options that are mostly related to the widget’s appearance and aesthetic features.

Color Style

This option allows you to choose from the available color styles that come bundled with the widget. Each style has it’s own color theme and effects, so pick the one that best first in with your site’s theme.

For best compatibility, we recommend using the “No Style” color theme (which is also the default option), which does not add any special coloring and attempts to use the theme’s style.

Ticker Animation

This option enables the ticker animation.

The ticker makes the widget show fewer feed items, but also scrolls the widget periodically, resulting in a new ticker style widget. The animation depends on the following two options.

Visible Items

This option represents the number of feed items visible when using the ticker animation.

This option is not to be confused with the Feed Item Count option, which tells the widget how many items the widget should have. Rather, this option tells the widget how many feed items should be shown by the ticker.

Consider this example:

If we set Feed Item Count to 10, then our widget will consist of 10 feed items. If we set the Visible Items option to 5 however, only the first 5 items from those 10 will be shown.

However, the ticker animation will then scroll up, hiding the first feed item and revealing the sixth one. The next animation will then hide the second feed item and reveal the seventh, and so on.

At any given time, only 5 items will be visible on the widget.

The default value for this option is 5 feed items.

Ticker Speed

This option allows you to configure how frequent the ticker animation should occur, in seconds.

By default this option is set to 5 seconds, meaning that every 5 seconds the widget’s ticker animation will scroll up one feed item.