Creating a custom element for Visual Composer

• jasonbongreen

  said

  The project I’m building a website for has received a lot of media attention over the past couple of years and I have a couple of hundred news articles to link to. I’m trying to generate a list of news article headlines (hyperlinked to the original news articles around the web) and then the date published in the following format:

  This is a News Article Headline, January 03, 2015
  This is a News Article Headline, January 02, 2015
  This is a News Article Headline, January 01, 2015

  I’d like these to be ordered with the latest articles on top.

  Here’s an example of what I’m talking about on the old website/template:
  http://sandyspringscitycenter.com/news/

  These were created manually in a text box, but we have so many links now, that WordPress is timing out when I try to save the page on the backend.

  I have the following data in a CSV file:

  News Article Headlines
  News Article URL
  News Article Date

  I’d like to import them as “Link” blog posts as follows:

  News Article Name > Blog Post Title
  News Article URL > Blog Post Link URL
  News Article Date > Blog Post Date

  Assuming I can figure out the importing part of the process, can you give me any information on how I’d go about creating a custom element in Visual Composer to display them in the desired format? Or is there a better way to accomplish what I am trying to do? I’m not a PHP programmer by any means, but I can hire someone if necessary.

  Thanks!

• jeffw

  said

  Help with creating a custom element for Visual Composer is way beyond the scope of theme support. If you need help with this kind of development you’ll need to purchase a personal license for the plugin and get support directly from the plugin author.

  Essentially you would need to first develop a shortcode that does what you want it to do, then you can “extend” Visual Composer with that shortcode. There is some basic information about this here → https://vc.wpbakery.com/features/extend-visual-composer/

• jasonbongreen

  said

  I think I went a little overboard in thinking I needed to set up a custom element for Visual Composer. I was able to get pretty close to my objective using a plugin called Displays Posts Shortcode (https://wordpress.org/plugins/display-posts-shortcode) and then just insert a shortcode in a text block.

  I implemented it at the bottom of the page here:

  http://citysprings.com/the-story
  Username: test
  Password: test

  The only problem is that when you click on the hyperlinked headline, it links to the blog post, and not the Link URL in the blog post (postformat_link_url).

  I’m going to hire a WordPress PHP developer to help me modify the plugin fix that.

  Thanks for your help Jeff! I’ll be sure to post this site in the showcase when it is wrapped up.