Automattic Releases WordPress Plugin for Facebook’s Instant Articles
by Sarah Gooding, WordPress Tavern
March 7, 2016

Today the WordPress.com VIP team released a plugin for Facebook’s Instant Articles, which will be open to any publisher starting April 12, 2016. Automattic partnered with Facebook and VIP-Featured-Partner agency Dekode to produce a plugin that outputs a compliant feed of posts wrapped in the required markup for Facebook.

Instant Articles for WordPress is now available on GitHub and is also coming soon to the WordPress plugin directory.

Publishers must go through a review process to ensure that their posts are properly formatted and compliant before being allowed to push content via Instant Articles. Once approved, articles will load nearly instantly on mobile devices. According to Facebook, the speed is as much as 10 times faster than the standard mobile web.

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The WordPress plugin is available at Facebook Instant Articles for WP — WordPress Plugins.

This plugin adds support for Instant Articles for Facebook, which is a new way for publishers to distribute fast, interactive stories on Facebook. Instant Articles are preloaded in the Facebook mobile app so they load instantly.

With the plugin active, a special RSS feed will be available at the URL /feed/instant-articles.

Developers: please note that this plugin is still in early stages and the underlying APIs (like filters, classes, etc.) may change.

Feed submission to Facebook
Facebook has a review process where they verify that all Instant Articles are properly formatted, have content consistency with their mobile web counterparts, and adhere to their community standards and content policies. You will not be able to publish Instant Articles in Facebook until your feed has been approved.

It’s important to note that if you use meta fields to add extra text, images or videos to your Posts, Facebook will expect you to add these to your Instant Articles output too. This plugin includes hooks to help you do that.

See Facebook’s documentation for full details of the submission process.

Facebook requires a minimum number of articles in your feed before they will review it. Once your feed has been approved, you can set the constant INSTANT_ARTICLES_LIMIT_POSTS to true to limit the feed to only show posts that have been modified within the last 24 hours. (Facebook will ignore any articles which were last modified more than 24 hours ago.)

Facebook will fetch your feed every 3 minutes.