TheGridIndex RSS Importer

TheGridIndex RSS Importer pulls headlines from external RSS feeds into WordPress as posts. Designed to pair with The Grid Index theme but works as a standalone importer with any theme.

About the name. “TheGridIndex” is a coined product name owned by Fifth Avenue Photographic (the plugin author) and is also the name of a companion WordPress theme by the same author. The plugin is not affiliated with any unrelated project, dataset, or service that happens to share the words “grid” or “index” in its name. Use of the companion theme is optional — the plugin works as a standalone importer with any theme.

Features:

• 47-feed curated catalog (News, World, Tech, Business, Science) — toggle on with one click
• Custom feeds — paste any RSS URL on the Feeds tab
• Per-feed check interval (5 min / 15 min / 30 min / hourly)
• Configurable post status (publish / draft / pending)
• Granular post categories — feeds map to News/World/Tech/Business/Science alongside the catch-all RSS category
• Featured image extraction from feed enclosures, media:thumbnail, media:content, or first content image
• Minimum image width filter
• Persistent GUID dedupe ledger — re-runs never create duplicates, even after posts are deleted
• Duplicate detector with bulk merge tool
• Feed health monitoring — flags feeds that fetch successfully but import nothing (silent failures)
• Embedded knowledge base with 15 FAQ entries
• Per-post source attribution meta for theme integration

When The Grid Index theme is active, imported posts automatically display:

• Source attribution chip in the article hero
• “Read at [Source]” CTA button below the hero
• The “Hide comments on imported RSS posts” Theme Option (if enabled) takes effect

External services

This plugin is an RSS feed importer. To do its job, it must connect to external (third-party) RSS feed URLs that you choose to enable. No feed is fetched until you explicitly enable it — either by toggling a feed on from the Catalog tab or by pasting a custom RSS URL on the Feeds tab. If you enable no feeds, the plugin makes no outbound requests.

What is sent, when, and why:

When a feed you have enabled is due for a check (per the global cron and that feed’s individual interval — 5 min / 15 min / 30 min / hourly), or when you click “Import Now,” “Force re-import 24h,” or a per-row “Fetch” button, the plugin makes a standard HTTP GET request from your WordPress server to the feed’s URL. That request includes:

• The feed URL you enabled (target of the request).
• A standard browser-style User-Agent header (used because some publishers’ WAFs reject WordPress’s default User-Agent).
• Standard HTTP headers (Accept, Accept-Encoding) added by the WordPress HTTP API.
• Your server’s outbound IP address (visible to the publisher in their access logs, as with any HTTP request).

No personal data about your site visitors is sent. No analytics, no telemetry, no user-identifying information. The plugin does not phone home to the plugin author or to any service the author controls.

Outbound caching. Successful and failed fetches are cached locally on your WordPress site via the standard SimplePie/WordPress transient cache to reduce redundant requests. No fetched content is sent off your server.

Custom feeds you add. If you paste your own RSS URL into the Feeds tab, the plugin fetches that URL on the same schedule. You are responsible for ensuring you have the right to import from that source and for reviewing that source’s terms.

Curated catalog publishers. The plugin ships with a catalog of 47 RSS feeds offered as a convenience. Each publisher operates independently of this plugin and its author. Use of each publisher’s feed is governed by that publisher’s own terms of service and privacy policy.

How to reach each publisher’s current legal pages. Each publisher operates their own legal pages on their own domain. The URLs publishers use for these pages change periodically — they reorganize sites, migrate to new help centers, move to consolidated parent-company legal portals (e.g. Condé Nast, Yahoo, NBCUniversal, Dow Jones, Disney/Paramount). Rather than hard-code per-publisher URLs that go stale, this readme lists each publisher’s home page, which is the canonical, stable entry point. Every publisher’s site footer carries links labeled “Terms” / “Terms of Use” / “Terms of Service” and “Privacy” / “Privacy Policy” / “Privacy Notice” that go to their current legal pages — those footer links are the publisher’s own source of truth and stay current as the publisher updates their policies. If you want to review a publisher’s terms before enabling their feed, open that publisher’s home page and use the footer links. Reasoning for this presentation choice: an earlier version of this readme hard-coded direct terms/privacy URLs for every publisher; within a single review cycle, 12 of those URLs already 404’d because publishers had moved their legal pages. Pointing to home pages eliminates this rot for both users reading this readme today and for any future reviewer.

The table below lists every publisher the plugin can connect to (catalog feeds plus the activation-time starter feeds), grouped by category:

News

• The New York Times — https://www.nytimes.com/
• BBC — https://www.bbc.com/
• The Guardian — https://www.theguardian.com/
• NPR — https://www.npr.org/
• Al Jazeera — https://www.aljazeera.com/
• Google News — https://news.google.com/
• USA Today — https://www.usatoday.com/
• The Washington Post — https://www.washingtonpost.com/
• ABC News (US) — https://abcnews.go.com/ (operated by Disney; legal pages are reached via the Disney/ABC site footer)
• CBS News — https://www.cbsnews.com/ (operated by Paramount; legal pages are reached via the CBS/Paramount site footer)
• Politico — https://www.politico.com/
• NBC News — https://www.nbcnews.com/ (operated by NBCUniversal; legal pages are reached via the NBC/NBCUniversal site footer)
• The Hill — https://thehill.com/
• ProPublica — https://www.propublica.org/
• Time — https://time.com/
• Bloomberg (Politics and Technology feeds) — https://www.bloomberg.com/
• LA Times — https://www.latimes.com/

Tech

• TechCrunch — https://techcrunch.com/
• The Verge (Vox Media) — https://www.theverge.com/ (legal pages governed by Vox Media; reached via the Verge site footer)
• Ars Technica (Condé Nast) — https://arstechnica.com/ (legal pages governed by Condé Nast; reached via the Ars Technica site footer)
• Wired (Condé Nast) — https://www.wired.com/ (legal pages governed by Condé Nast; reached via the Wired site footer)
• Engadget (Yahoo) — https://www.engadget.com/ (legal pages governed by Yahoo; reached via the Engadget site footer)
• Hacker News — https://news.ycombinator.com/ (feed served via the hnrss.org community bridge — bridge home: https://hnrss.github.io/)
• 9to5Mac — https://9to5mac.com/
• MIT Technology Review — https://www.technologyreview.com/
• ZDNet (Red Ventures) — https://www.zdnet.com/ (legal pages governed by Red Ventures; reached via the ZDNet site footer)

Business

• Financial Times — https://www.ft.com/
• Harvard Business Review — https://hbr.org/
• Fast Company — https://www.fastcompany.com/ (legal pages governed by Mansueto Ventures; reached via the Fast Company site footer)
• Forbes — https://www.forbes.com/
• Wall Street Journal (Dow Jones; feed publishes headlines, full articles paywalled) — https://www.wsj.com/ (legal pages governed by Dow Jones; reached via the WSJ site footer)
• MarketWatch (Dow Jones) — https://www.marketwatch.com/ (legal pages governed by Dow Jones; reached via the MarketWatch site footer)
• CNBC (NBCUniversal) — https://www.cnbc.com/ (legal pages governed by NBCUniversal; reached via the CNBC site footer)

Science

• Science Daily — https://www.sciencedaily.com/
• NASA (US government, public domain content) — https://www.nasa.gov/

World

• Deutsche Welle — https://www.dw.com/
• France 24 — https://www.france24.com/
• CBC News (Canada) — https://www.cbc.ca/news
• ABC News (Australia) — https://www.abc.net.au/news

AI / Vendor blogs (starter feeds, not in the curated 47-feed catalog)

• OpenAI — https://openai.com/
• Google AI Blog (Alphabet) — https://blog.google/
• Hugging Face — https://huggingface.co/

Listing above does not imply endorsement or affiliation. If a publisher you want to use is not in the catalog, you can add their RSS URL manually via the Feeds tab; the same disclosure (HTTP GET with browser-style User-Agent) applies.