Four editorial blocks for WordPress newsrooms, built right to left first. They are written for Arabic and English from the start, so in Arabic the layout mirrors, the ticker scrolls the other way, and every count uses the right one of Arabic’s six plural forms, with no theme work.

Breaking news bar

A scrolling strip of the newest headlines from a category you choose. It shows only posts from the last few hours (24 by default) and disappears by itself when there is nothing that recent, so nobody has to remember to take it down. Readers can pause it or close it. It pauses on hover and keyboard focus, and stands still for readers who ask their system for reduced motion.

Read also

A box of up to five related articles, picked by searching in the editor and put in any order. An article that is later unpublished or deleted simply drops out, and a story never links to itself.

Story timeline

How a story unfolded, one dated event after another. Each event has a date picker that fills in a label editors can rewrite (“Morning”, “Day 2”), a heading and free content. It is saved as plain HTML with machine-readable dates, so it outlives the plugin.

Live updates

A live blog. Editors add timestamped updates, newest on top, and can mark key updates. Readers see each update’s time and a “how long ago” label that keeps counting. When new updates are published, readers who have the page open get a “Show 2 new updates” button that brings them in without reloading the page. Turning off “Coverage is live” tells readers that coverage has ended and stops the checking, on pages they already have open too.

Right to left, built in

The layout mirrors in Arabic and other right-to-left languages, with no separate styles to maintain.
The breaking news bar scrolls in the reading direction.
An Arabic translation is included, written for Arabic readers rather than translated word for word, with all six plural forms.
Labels use Western digits, as WordPress itself does in Arabic.

Built for busy sites

The live blog asks a small endpoint how many updates are newer than the ones on the page. Its answer is public and cached for 15 seconds, so during a big story a CDN can answer most readers.
“Show new updates” fetches a fresh copy of the page, which a page cache cannot have kept from before the update.
Checking pauses while the tab is hidden, and stops once coverage ends.

Privacy

The plugin sends nothing to any outside service, sets no cookies and stores nothing in the reader’s browser. Readers’ browsers ask only your own site for new updates.

Source code

The blocks ship compiled. Their source code, the build tools and the tests are on GitHub: https://github.com/mantekio/wp-newsroom-blocks

ManTek Newsroom Blocks