PublishRank 2.9.71 — opt-in News feed

Release contents

• Adds an opt-in PublishRank → News screen that reads the public Netlify JSON announcements feed only after an administrator enables it.
• Displays validated announcement content with summaries, optional same-host HTTPS images and links, expandable details, and publication dates.
• Adds nonce- and capability-protected enable, refresh, and disable actions. Disabling removes both local feed caches.
• Bounds remote requests, validates the feed schema and status, sanitizes and escapes rendered values, ignores popup/HTML instructions, and supports a limited stale-cache fallback.
• Adds privacy-policy disclosure, WordPress.org external-service documentation, and a dedicated News feed operations guide.
• Synchronizes plugin header, runtime version, stable tag, and regression fixture to 2.9.71.

Validation

All 32 standalone PHP regression scripts passed. Recursive PHP syntax checks passed, JavaScript syntax checks passed, git diff --check passed, and the Composer PHPCS command exited successfully with 0 errors. It reports 177 warnings across 50 files; these are non-blocking and remain a visible backlog. The new News screen file itself passes the project PHPCS ruleset without warnings.

The live endpoint returned HTTP 200 with application/json; its 23,730-byte payload parsed as schema 1.0 with an active feed, a one-hour TTL, 10 announcements, eight active non-example items, and unique announcement IDs. The two supplied text copies are incomplete and invalid JSON at line 447, so they were not treated as production feed payloads; the live endpoint itself validated successfully.

The WordPress.org submission archive was built as dist/PublishRank-v2.9.71.zip. It contains 195 files under one publishrank/ directory and excludes repository metadata, development tools, tests, and documentation.

Manual interaction gap

A live staging WordPress dashboard was not available for browser testing. The score-card drag script and touch-action: none styling are present and the script is enqueued on supported post editor screens, but mouse, pen, and touch movement have not been verified in a browser. The new News actions submit to the registered admin-post.php handler with a nonce and capability check; the earlier general admin-screen buttons have not been validated interactively. Test these behaviors on a clean staging site before production rollout.