Instant Articles for WP

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 new menu will be available for you to connect to your Facebook Page and start publishing your Instant Articles. You’ll also see the status of each Instant Articles submission on the edit page of your posts.

A best effort is made to generate valid Instant Article markup from your posts’ content/metadata and publish it to Facebook. The plugin knows how to transform your posts’ markup from a set of rules which forms a mapping between elements in you source markup and the valid Instant Article components. We refer to this “glue” between the two as the Transformer Rules.

Built-in to the plugin are many pre-defined transformer rules which aims to cover standard WordPress installations. If your WordPress content contains elements which are not covered by the built-in ruleset, you can define your own additional rules to extend or override the defaults in the Settings of this plugin, under: Plugin Configuration > Publishing Settings > Custom transformer rules.

Maintenance

Support for this plugin is provided for PHP 8 migrations, but both Automattic/WPVIP and Facebook/Meta have stopped all active development. At this point in the product lifecycle, publishers should be advised to stop using this plugin, and instead, use direct site traffic for Facebook content.
Meta have announced that Instant Articles will have all support dropped at April 2023.

Access to Instant Articles

The current criteria for access to Instant Articles are:
– your Facebook Page must have an established presence of at least 90 days
– your content adheres to the Instant Article Policies

Before your Instant Articles can be published on Facebook, your feed must undergo an initial review and approval. Facebook requires a minimum number of 10 articles in your feed before being eligible for review. The review process checks that your draft Instant Articles are properly formatted, have content consistency with their mobile web counterparts, and adhere to the community standards and content policies.

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.

Once your feed has been approved, new posts will automatically be taken live on Instant Articles, and existing posts will be taken live once you update them. In order to stay in the Instant Articles program, you must remain active by creating new content and maintaining a minimal readership.