In an announcement of the new plugin for WordPress, Chris Ackermann – a member of the partner engineering team at Facebook – said in a Facebook Media blog post that the plugin makes it fairly easy for the users of WordPress platform to directly generate and publish Instant Articles. Since it’s an open source, you can obtain it and submit your reports to the community.
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Unlike Google Posts, where content appears exclusively in Google search query results, Instant Articles creates content specifically for Facebook, but every Instant Article either through WordPress or not has a corresponding mobile Web article that serves up in search results.
The WordPress plugin alleviates much of the skills gap while also helping to make the Instant Articles format more ubiquitous. That is about to happen now with a WordPress plugin released by Facebook along with Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Then, it decided to make it easier for some publishers to share their content on the platform.
The plugin creates a special RSS feed that automatically optimises Facebook posts to appear as Instant Articles.
The plugin is now available to download from GitHub, but they have revealed that it’ll be coming to the plugin repository soon. This tool will take a blog’s content and parses it. In this example, the third-party video player embedded in this Zap2it article from Tribune Broadcasting is beautifully adapted for the Instant Articles experience.
When Instant Articles opens up in April, publishers that use standard WordPress templates can activate the plugin out-of-the-box to create Instant Articles. Instant Articles will not be available for everyone to use until 12 April, but the availability of the plugin gives publishers the opportunity to get prepared.
Considering the partnership with WordPress, the Instant Articles feature may gain a lot more ground in the near future. By publishing their stories on Facebook, news organizations are ceding some authority over the distribution of their work.
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Furthermore, publishers will now have the option to allow Facebook sell advertising in their Instant Articles.
