TECHED.TV News Ticker

If you are Podcaster and have a Blog, and would like to have a News Ticker with your Podcast only. I made a news ticker that consumes your Podcast RSS Feed.  This  comprehensive blog post explains,  how the TECHED.TV Ticker works.

This ticker can connect to your RSS and Podcast feed, and scroll in your web page, a post, or even in a floating window if you can write some code..

As shown below, in green “Latest News TECHED.TV” segment on my home page:

A slim scrolling news ticker for any RSS or Atom feed. Displays the latest items from a feed as a horizontal scrolling strip with thumbnail, title, and date, pausing when hovered or focused.

• 📺 Reads any RSS or Atom feed – podcast, YouTube, Medium, another WordPress site
• 🔄 Falls back to this site’s own /feed/podcast if no URL is given
• 🖼️ When the feed is local, thumbnails come from the real featured images
• 🌐 Otherwise falls back to itunes:image, media:thumbnail or an enclosure image
• ⚡ Cached in a transient, so the feed is fetched rarely, not per page view
• 📍 Place it with a shortcode, a widget, a template tag, or automatically
• 🎯 No jQuery, no build step, no external requests beyond the feed itself
• 🛠�� Respects prefers-reduced-motion: falls back to a static scrollable strip
• 🎨 Theme-neutral styling with customizable accent color

1. Go to Plugins > Add New
2. Search for “TECHED.TV Ticker”
3. Click Install Now and then Activate

1. Upload the techedtv-ticker folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the Plugins menu in WordPress
3. Go to Settings > TECHED.TV Ticker to configure the settings

[techedtv_ticker feed="https://medium.com/feed/techedtv" count="8" speed="60" label="From Medium"]

Insert the ticker using the shortcode:

[\techedtv_ticker\]

With custom parameters:

[\techedtv_ticker feed="https://medium.com/feed/techedtv" count="8" speed="60" label="From Medium"\]

Available shortcode parameters:

• feed – RSS/Atom feed URL (defaults to site’s podcast feed)
• count – Number of items to show (2-30, default: 10)
• speed – Seconds per pass (10-240, default: 45)
• label – Custom label text (default: “Latest from TECHED.TV”)

Place the ticker anywhere in your theme:

<?php if ( function_exists( 'techedtv_ticker_render' ) ) { techedtv_ticker_render(); } ?>

Return the markup instead of printing it:

<?php $html = techedtv_ticker_get( array( 'count' => 6 ) ); ?>

Add the “TECHED.TV Ticker” widget to your sidebar or widget area through Appearance > Widgets.

Configure automatic placement in Settings > TECHED.TV Ticker:

• Top of page – Uses wp_body_open hook
• Bottom of page – Uses wp_footer hook

Navigate to Settings > TECHED.TV Ticker to configure:

• Uses WordPress fetch_feed() (SimplePie wrapper)
• Falls back to itunes:image, media:thumbnail, or enclosure image for thumbnails
• Caches feed data in WordPress transients
• Automatically clears cache when settings change

• Vanilla JavaScript (no dependencies)
• Clones track content to create seamless infinite scroll
• Calculates animation duration based on content width
• Respects prefers-reduced-motion media query

• Theme-neutral design (inherits from parent theme)
• Custom property --techedtv-accent for color customization
• Fixed positioning option for sticky ticker
• Responsive layout with proper box-sizing

Open Settings > TECHED.TV Ticker. The box at the top reports how many items were read from the feed. If it says none, the feed URL is wrong or unreachable from the server. Try the URL in a browser first.

The feed is cached. Saving the settings page clears the cache automatically; there is also a “Clear cached feed now” button at the bottom of that screen.

Settings > TECHED.TV Ticker > Seconds per pass. Higher is slower. The plugin scales the duration to the width of the content, so the perceived speed stays constant no matter how many items you load.

Yes! The plugin is designed to be theme-neutral and works with any modern WordPress theme.

Yes, as long as your custom post type has an RSS feed, you can use it with the ticker.

• First release
• Full feature set for RSS/Atom feed ticker
• Shortcode, widget, template tag, and automatic placement
• Configurable settings with caching
• Reduced motion support

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

1. Fork the repository
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b feature/AmazingFeature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add some AmazingFeature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin feature/AmazingFeature)
5. Open a Pull Request

This project is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

• License: Apache-2.0