About this plugin
PublishDesk Connector turns WordPress into a newsroom command center. Connect a
free PublishDesk workspace and run your whole editorial operation — breaking
coverage, multi-site publishing, and post management — without living in
wp-admin. It also ships a genuinely useful free breaking-news banner that
works with no account at all.
What you can do
- Breaking-news banner and live coverage like the major networks. Go live in
PublishDesk and a site-wide breaking banner appears on your site — pulsing LIVE
indicator, auto-updating “last updated” time, and a link to the full live
story. Optional CNN-style ticker. Works with no JavaScript (server-rendered).
- Publish into the exact category on any of your sites. PublishDesk reads
each site’s real category tree (including sub-categories), tags, and menus
through this connector, so a post lands in precisely the term you choose — on
every site, each with its own taxonomy.
- Manage, move, and update posts without logging into wp-admin. Update
content, move between categories, change status, or remove posts remotely — and
detect when someone edited a post directly in WordPress, with no silent
overwrites.
- One editorial workflow across all your WordPress sites. Plan, draft, review,
and publish from a single workspace.
- AI-assisted drafting under full editorial control. Your content is processed
to provide features and is never used to train AI models.
Free, no account required
- Local breaking-news banner. Set a headline, link, color, and placement right
here in the plugin settings and show a breaking banner on your site — no
PublishDesk account needed.
Free vs. the full command center
- Free (local mode): the local breaking-news banner, controlled from this
plugin’s settings.
- With a free PublishDesk workspace: live multi-editor breaking coverage with
real-time updates, publish-from-anywhere into exact categories, remote post
management, drift detection, the full taxonomy/menu sync, the Site Manager, and
the AI editorial workflow.
PublishDesk is an external service. Connecting is optional; the free local
features above work without it. See the privacy policy at
io/legal/privacy and terms at
io/legal/terms.
External services
This plugin’s free local feature (the breaking-news banner) runs entirely on your
own site and makes no outbound calls.
If you choose to connect a PublishDesk workspace, this plugin communicates with
io (the address is
fixed; there is no way to point it elsewhere from the plugin settings except an
advanced field for self-hosted/development use).
- What is sent: your site’s URL, the WordPress Application Password you
create for the connection, and the editorial content, categories, tags, and
post metadata needed to publish or manage a post you have explicitly asked
PublishDesk to handle. No data is sent unless and until you complete the
connection step in this plugin’s settings.
- When it is sent: when you actively use a connected feature — publish from
PublishDesk, sync taxonomy, load live-coverage updates, or check the
connection’s health — and, once a workspace is connected, on a periodic
background schedule (about once a minute via WP-Cron) to pull and publish any
posts you have queued in PublishDesk for this site. This outbound delivery lets
publishing work even on hosts whose firewall blocks incoming requests. The
plugin makes no calls to PublishDesk until you complete the connection step.
- Why: PublishDesk is the paid editorial workspace this plugin connects to;
the service is the plugin’s stated purpose (multi-site publishing, breaking
coverage, and remote post management), not incidental data collection.
- Images: when PublishDesk delivers a post that has a featured image, this
plugin downloads that image file from PublishDesk’s media host,
io, and stores it in your own WordPress media
library. This happens only while publishing a post you queued in PublishDesk,
and only for a connected site.
- Provider: PublishDesk (https://publishdesk.io).
io/legal/terms
io/legal/privacy