Sometime back Facebook’s F8 conference announced that Instant Articles will be open to all publishers. FB has partnered with Automattic, the company behind WordPress to build a free plugin that simplifies the process of generating and publishing Instant Articles from WordPress. This will enable millions of publishers using WordPress on their websites bring the Instant Articles experience to their readers.
You can install the plugin from GitHub and now it is also available from WordPress plugin repository as Instant Articles for WP.
By making use of this new plugin, people using Facebook for iPhone or Android, would be able to load articles in Facebook’s News Feed up to ten times faster than standard web articles, and are optimized for the mobile reading experience.
It includes a built-in set of interactive tools such as video auto-playing and tap-to-zoom image galleries, bringing stories to life on mobile devices. Automattic is working with Facebook, and VIP Featured Partner agency Dekode, on this plugin which takes care of the basics.
So you simply need to activate it, and you’ll have a compliant feed of Posts, wrapping your core content in the markup Facebook requires. Once the plugin is active, a new menu will be available for you to connect to your Facebook Page and start publishing your Instant Articles. It will also show you the status of each Instant Article submission on the edit screen of your posts.
FB has a process of reviewing all articles from your website whether they are properly formatted and adhere to their community standards and content policies before you’ll be able to start pushing content to the platform.
If in-case your WordPress website content has elements which are not covered by the built-in rule-set then you can define your own additional rules to extend or override the defaults. This can be done from the settings page of this plugin, under: Plugin Configuration -> Publishing Settings -> Custom transformer rules.