WordPress Live Stream Widget Plugin

Jealous of those fancy schmancy animated widgets in Facebook and Twitter that constantly scroll the site’s latest info to users? Well now you can add your own slick animated version to your site with the ‘Live Stream Widget’!

What does it do?

Once activated, this plugin makes a new widget available that you can add to any sidebar.

Features include:

Show an animated loop of latest posts and comments
On Multisite, choose to show content from across the entire network
Works well with all themes
Choose height of widget
Select how many items to show in the loop
Option to display user avatars

To work its magic on Multisite networks, this plugin requires the Post Indexer and Comment Indexer plugins.

For single WordPress installations, simply activate the plugin and insert the Live Stream Widget into any widgetized area of your site.

For help and information on installing plugins you can view our Installing WordPress Plugins Manual.

Live Stream works with both single installations of WordPress and Multisite.

NOTE: If using multisite, you must install and activate the Post Indexer Plugin and the Comment Indexer Plugin before you activating Live Stream Widget Plugin.

Using Live Stream Widget on Multisite Installations

Once you have the plugin installed and Network Activated, you can navigate to any site on your network and check out the Appearance>Widgets Menu to see that you have a new Widget called Live Stream available.

Then it’s as simple as dragging and dropping the widget in to the sidebar (or any other available wigetized area) that you want to display it in!

Once you have it settled where you want it, you can check out the widget menu and set your options:

1. Choose the site or network content you want displayed.
2. Select the post types to display.
3. Select the categories and tags.
4. Choose how the content should scroll.
5. Set the widget height.
6. Enter the number of items to loop through.
7. Set the number of characters that should display in each entry.
8. Set the scrolling time delay.
9. Want avatars and a scrollbar too?

Don’t forget to click Save!

Show Author Avatar: Works with our Avatar Plugin to display the avatar of the post author!

Please note, at current this plugin does not support custom post types, but we plan to add this in a future release.

Then you’ll have a shiny new widget with all the animated feed trimmings! Just like this one:

Note that this widget does some filtering on the feed items. The logic is that it only shows Posts/Comments for users from the current site. The checkbox allows you to include Posts/Comment for the same list of users across all sites. So, if you install the widget on site3.mysite.com it will only show posts for users on site3. If you set the checkbox will still only show posts/comments for users on site3 but will also show the the posts/comments that site3 users made on other sites in the network.

Using Live Stream Widget on Single Installations of WordPress

Live Stream Widget requires no special preparation for single installations of WordPress. Simply activate the plugin and visit the widgets panel in the Appearance section of the WordPress admin menus (Appearance>Widgets).

Once there, all settings for the Live Stream Widget mirror those explained above for the multisite WordPress installation. If you run a site with multiple authors, Live Stream Widget will automatically pull the author’s gravatar (if he/she has set one up) to use as a thumbnail image next to the post/comment widget content.