PublishDesk Connector

Description

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
https://publishdesk.io/legal/privacy and terms at
https://publishdesk.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
the PublishDesk API, hosted at https://api.publishdesk.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,
  https://media.publishdesk.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).
  Terms of use: https://publishdesk.io/legal/terms
  Privacy policy: https://publishdesk.io/legal/privacy

Technical details