WordPress blog and site publishers will now Create Facebook Instant Articles in WordPress with New Plugin from April 12, 2016.
Just like (AMP), Instant Articles creates a responsive version that enhances interactivity and gives you quality experience. The plugin is extremely fast – loading within Facebook itself – making it totally reliable for speed and urgency.
Instant Articles plugin is easy to use once you are familiar with it. Learning it is super easy as well. Once you activate the plugin, your site will get a new feed similar to RSS, but with extra data. The plugin itself creates Instant Articles, not the publisher.
Once you submit your feed, Facebook will review it and give you a feedback by use of its debugging tools. Instant Articles plugin has been carefully developed to be compatible with some of the other commonly used plugins in WordPress.
For developers, you can customise your feeds using the plugin’s filters and hooks; however, if you want to add other advanced features like audio captioning, maps and the like, you’ll need to dig into the code and add a few extra lines for it to work. This excludes videos and galleries which are totally sorted by the plugin.
Instant Articles is not the easy ‘type and post’ that we are used to on Facebook. As mentioned earlier, there is a process that your article goes through before being posted on Facebook. In fact, your article will need approval before going public on Facebook. Your Instant Articles must be formatted properly and be at par with Facebook’s standards and policies. Also, prior to sending your articles, you must fix all issues available since the plugin does not enable you to fix as you go.
Not all your posts are sent to Facebook, unless that’s your liking. You are 100% in control of what you want to publish and what you want to leave on your site/blog. You’ll be able to do this by use of tags or categories on WordPress.
As much as the plugin –to some extent- allows you to customise it, it is advisable to consult a developer or have a developer make the change for you so as not to interfere with anything that can jeopardize your work. This does not apply to the normal Instant Articles posting –you can achieve that completely on your own.
Being open source, Instant Articles plugin allows feedback from developers concerning bugs. You can make a request via GitHub, where the plugin is also currently available.
