README

Contributors: Chris Reynolds
Donate link: https://paypal.me/jazzsequence
License: GPLv3
License URI: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html

Adds a GitHub release widget to your WordPress dashboard for a public GitHub repository.

Installation

1. Download the zip file, unzip, and upload to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
2. Activate Dashboard Changelog through the 'Plugins' menu in WordPress.
3. Go to your General Settings page, and add the repository you'd like to display updates from in / format (e.g. jazzsequence/dashboard-changelog).
4. For private repositories, add a GitHub Personal Access Token (PAT) to allow the plugin to fetch data on your behalf. You can get a PAT in your GitHub settings, or by following this official guide.
5. Choose if you want to automatically translate the changelog. Under the hood, the translation is done freely by the Google Translate API.

How to use

By default, Dashboard Changelog will pull updates from GitHub releases, with the body content of each release acting as content for each update. In order to use, your repository will need to use releases. (The GitHub API endpoint can be modified to use any endpoint that is available, however additional customization would likely need to be done to format the data that gets pulled into the update.) The plugin will pull the 3 most recent releases and cache the API data for 24 hours.

Screenshots

[Dashboard Changelog appearance.]

[Dashboard Changelog setting in General Settings.]

Developer Reference

There are a number of filter hooks that can be used to modify the plugin to suit your needs. By default, this plugin was built to pull GitHub releases, specifically. but this can be changed to any API endpoint the GitHub API provides, or, potentially, pull updates from any public API.

dc.api_expiration

Filters the cache expiration time.

API requests are filtered using wp_cache_set and wp_cache_get so we are making as few hits to the API as possible. By default, cached data from the API is stored for 1 day. You can filter this to whatever length you would prefer.

Parameters

$expire (int) The length to retain cached response codes.

dc.api.url

The API URL

By default, this is https://api.github.com/repos, the GitHub API endpoint for repositories, specifically. If you want to use a completely different API, you can filter this variable.

Parameters

$base_url (string) The API URL to filter.

dc.widget.max_display

The number of updates to display.

By default, we display 3 updates (releases) from the API, but this can be updates here.

Parameters

$max_display (int) The number of release updates to display.

JSDC_REPOSITORY

Global constant that can be used to hard-code the repository. If defined, the setting does not display in general settings. This constant can be defined in the wp-config.php file or elsewhere.

JSDC_PAT

Global constant that can be used to hard-code the Personal Access Token. If defined, the setting does not display in general settings. This constant can be defined in the wp-config.php file or elsewhere.

Note: There is no validation done on these strings, so make sure they're saved in the proper format.

JSDC_TRANSLATE

Global constant to force the changelog translation. If set, the setting does not display in general settings. Set it to 1 (enable) or 0 (disable).This constant can be defined in the wp-config.php file or elsewhere.

Note: There is no validation done on these strings, so make sure they're saved in the proper format.