Add your own RSS feed to WordPress Dashboard

If you develop WordPress websites for clients you may wish to show posts from your RSS feed in your clients WordPress Dashboard. This is especially useful if you regularly publish articles that will help your clients. Fortunately this is really simple using the WordPress wp_add_dashboard_widget and wp_widget_rss_output functions.

How to show your feed in another WordPress Dashboard

Follow the instructions below and you’ll soon be showing your blog posts in your WordPress Dashboard.

1. Using an FTP client, such as FileZilla, open the website functions.php file in an editor.
2. Add the following to the end of the functions.php file (before the closing ?>)

3. add_action('wp_dashboard_setup', 'organicweb_dashboard_widgets');
   
   function organicweb_dashboard_widgets() {
   // CHANGE 'OrganicWeb News' BELOW TO THE TITLE OF YOUR WIDGET
   wp_add_dashboard_widget( 'dashboard_custom_feed', 'OrganicWeb News', 'organicweb_custom_feed_output' );
   
   function organicweb_custom_feed_output() {
   echo '<div class="rss-widget">';
   wp_widget_rss_output(array(
   // CHANGE THE URL BELOW TO THAT OF YOUR FEED
   'url' => 'https://organicweb.com.au/feed/',
   // CHANGE 'OrganicWeb News' BELOW TO THE NAME OF YOUR WIDGET
   'title' => 'OrganicWeb News',
   // CHANGE '2' TO THE NUMBER OF FEED ITEMS YOU WANT SHOWING
   'items' => 2,
   // CHANGE TO '0' IF YOU ONLY WANT THE TITLE TO SHOW
   'show_summary' => 1,
   // CHANGE TO '1' TO SHOW THE AUTHOR NAME
   'show_author' => 0,
   // CHANGE TO '1' TO SHOW THE PUBLISH DATE
   'show_date' => 0
   ));
   echo "</div>";
   }
   }

4. Make changes to the script per the instructions.
5. Save the functions.php changes to your webhost server.

Login to your Dashboard and you’ll now notice a widget with your feed items showing.