Trending Now 1.1.1

Presentation release: the widget now looks like a news feed out of the box, and three ordering and layout bugs are fixed.

This is the first release existing sites can install by themselves — 1.1.0 shipped the updater, so a 1.1.0 install offers this on the Plugins screen with no manual upload. Verified end to end against this release.

Release lookups are cached for six hours, so a site may not notice immediately; Trending Now → Diagnostics → Check for updates forces it.

Added

• news is the default layout, thumbnails on. A bare [trending_now] now renders source line, headline and an image pinned to the right of each row, rather than a plain text list. Sites that never chose a layout inherit it; anything set explicitly is untouched.
• Maximum age cutoff (max_age_hours) — hide anything published longer ago than the window. 48 for a two-day feed, 0 to disable. It applies before the selection tiers, so it outranks the exposure floor; the admin warns when a floor is set longer than the cutoff, since that promises a run the cutoff will not let finish.
• Timestamps read 45m or 6h inside the last day and a date beyond it, with a style toggle (date_style) to force dates instead. Relative stamps read as live, but on a once-a-day cycle every item drifts towards 20h together, which advertises the batch update — the toggle trades one against the other.
• Site icons beside source names (show_icons, off by default).
• Display settings — layout, thumbnails, source names, timestamps and their style are now configurable in the admin and act as defaults for the shortcode, block and template tag.
• SerpAPI top stories mode — Google News mainstream front page for a country and language, no query required. Returns roughly ten articles per fetch, so a large news share wants more than one source.
• The archive matches the widget, using the same card markup, classes and display settings instead of its own unstyled list.

Fixed

• The newest articles were rendered last. The list was sorted by selection tier before publication date, so anything already shown outranked anything brand new — on a twelve-slot widget the two freshest stories sat at positions 11 and 12. Tiers decide which items are selected, not the order they appear in.
• The thumbnail wrapped below the headline. The base item rule sets flex-wrap: wrap, which the news rule never reset, so a long headline claimed the whole line and pushed the image down. Short headlines happened to look right, which is why it read as intermittent.
• Relative timestamps were frozen in the cache. The label was baked in at build time and the cache is only busted once per ingest cycle, so an article rendered at 42m still claimed 42m up to twenty hours later. Labels are now recalculated per request from the datetime attribute already in the markup — no database access, and the cached blob stays valid.

Notes

Setting news_share_pct to 50 also needs max_source_share_pct at 50 if the news comes from a single source; otherwise the per-source cap throttles it and the shortfall is quietly backfilled with network links.

Full detail in CHANGELOG.md.