Usage
- Publishing and managing articles from the Apple News list
- Publishing from the post edit screen
- Tips
- Troubleshooting
Once the configuration steps are completed, you're ready to publish content to Apple News. If you've chosen to automatically publish your blog content to Apple News, all posts will automatically be pushed to your Apple News channel when published.
The Apple News menu in the dashboard takes you to a list of posts that are eligible for publishing to Apple News. Either click the top menu or the submenu labeled "Articles".
It includes all posts of the types you've selected in Post Type Options that are published.
The Apple News list gives you full control over all content in your Apple News channel. Let's look at all of the features available.
The columns of the table provide the following information about each post:
Title: The title of the post in WordPress.
Last updated at: The last time the post was updated in Apple News.
Apple News Status: This is the live status of the post in Apple News. It can be any of the following values:
- PROCESSING: The article has been published and is going through processing.
- LIVE: The article has been published, finished processing, and is visible in the News app.
- PROCESSING_UPDATE: A previous version of the article is visible in the News app, and an update is currently in processing.
- TAKEN_DOWN: The article was previously visible in the News app, but was taken down.
- FAILED_PROCESSING: The article failed during processing and is not visible in the News app.
- FAILED_PROCESSING_UPDATE: A previous version of the article is visible in the News app, but an update failed during processing.
Please see the Apple News API Reference for more information.
Sync Status: This indicates the status of the post as it is currently synced with Apple News. This can be any of the following values:
- Not published: Never sent to Apple News.
- Published: Live in Apple News.
- Pending: Sent to Apple News, but pending going live.
- Needs to be updated: Live in Apple News, but there are changes in WordPress that need to be sent to Apple News.
- Deleted: Previously published, but now removed from Apple News.
The fields at the top of the table can be used to filter posts by the following criteria:
Status: This is the current status of the post in Apple News and can be one of the following:
- Published: Published and live in your Apple News channel
- Not Published: Never sent to Apple News.
- Pending: Sent to Apple News, but not yet live.
- Deleted: Deleted from your Apple News channel.
Show Posts From and Show Posts To: Use a date picker to select posts that were published only within a certain date range.
Search: Use the box at the left to search posts by title, excerpt or content.
There are also standard pagination controls at the top and bottom to manually page through the posts.
Using the checkboxes at the left and the bulk actions menu at the top left, you can select multiple posts to publish.
- Check off the posts you want to bulk publish or click the box at the very top to select all posts on that screen.
- Select "Publish" from the bulk actions menu in the top left.
- Click "Apply" next to the bulk publishing menu to start the process. You'll be taken to a screen where you can review the posts to be published.
- If all looks OK, click the Publish All button to get started. Do not leave this screen until all posts are successfully published. When bulk publishing is complete, posts will be marked as status Success and the Publish All button text will change to Done.
If you mouse over the row of any unpublished post in the table, you'll see an action for Publish.
Clicking that link will start the process to publish an individual post. You'll be taken to a screen where you can set post specific options.
Sections: These correspond to the sections that you've defined in your Apple News channel.
Preview: Whether or not to publish this as a draft. These will appear in the list of "Drafts from CMS" in iCloud Publisher. Please note that if your channel is not yet approved by Apple, you can only publish as draft.
Pull quote: This is where you can defined a pull quote to appear in the middle of your article. See Formatting Options and the Apple News Format Reference for more information.
Pull quote position: This determines whether the pull quote appears in the top third, middle or bottom third of the post content.
When you're ready to publish, just click Save Settings and Publish to Apple News. All settings entered are stored with the post and can be edited later from the Apple News meta box on the post edit screen.
If all goes well, you'll see the following success notice in the dashboard:
Please note that if you are using asynchronous publishing, you may not see the message immediately.
You can download the Apple News format JSON file for any post whether published or not by clicking on the Download link pictured above. This will create a file named like article-1234.json where 1234 is the actual post ID. Please note that if you're using these files with the News Preview tool, you have to rename them to article.json. The post ID is included by default in case you want to export multiple files so they won't overwrite each other.
Unfortunately, if you're using bundled images, they don't export with the JSON file. This is in order to maintain compatibility with the widest range of web hosts since some won't allow us to dynamically produce a ZIP file containing all the post content.
Once a post is published to Apple News, the available row actions available change.
If you are not using automatic updates you can simply click Publish again to update the post. If the post needs updating, it will be noted as "Needs to be updated" in the Sync Status column. If the post does not need to be updated, nothing will happen when you click Publish.
If you need to delete a published post from Apple News, simply click the Delete link next to that post. Apple News will display a placeholder indicating that the post is no longer available.
If you click the "Copy News URL" link, the plugin will display the direct link to the post in Apple News. If accessed from a device with the app installed, your post will open in Apple News. If clicked from a desktop or incompatible device, it will automatically redirect back to the URL for the post on your website, referred to as the "canonical URL".
Occasionally, an error might cause a post to get stuck in pending status. If you're certain this has happened and the post isn't ever going to publish, you can click the Reset link for the post and then try to publish it again.
All of the functionality described in the previous section for publishing articles is also available on the post edit screen. Please make sure you've enabled the Apple News meta box in your settings. Since we've previously described these fields, we won't go into detail again but instead focus on the workflow from the post edit screen.
Just as from the Apple News list, you can enter all the same post-specific information right here on the post edit screen. Just as with any other meta box, all of the information here saves when the post is saved, even if it's not yet published. This is especially useful if you're using automatic publishing. This allows you to preconfigure posts for Apple News before they go live.
If you're ready to publish the post to Apple News and it's already been published in WordPress, simply click the Publish to Apple News button at the bottom of the meta box. Please note that if you have automatic publishing enabled you will not see this button since the post will be automatically published to Apple News when it's published in WordPress.
Once the post is published, the button will be replaced with information about the post in Apple News:
In general, little effort should be required to prepare your content itself for publishing to Apple News once you've configured this plugin to your desired settings. Even so, these simple tips will help your content look its best:
By default, images inserted in your content will be placed inline, and will follow WordPress placement rules. You may find your images will be presented better within Apple News if you take the time to set the appearance of each image. To do this, in the WordPress text editor, click on an image, which will display a contextual alignment menu. This will provide you with a series of simple granular controls, allowing you to determine more precisely where each image will be displayed when your post appears in Apple News.
The featured image on your post will automatically be used as the Apple News cover image. If no featured image is found, the first available image in the post will be used as the cover and will be automatically removed from the body in order to avoid duplication.
Note that images smaller than the body width on a given device will always be aligned. If you want to display an image without alignment, make sure it's big enough to be full width.
You may also select an image to appear as a banner at the top of your post. To do this, choose a featured image by clicking on the “Set Featured Image” link when creating or updating a post. The image will displayed full width at the top of the selected post.
You can add image galleries the same way you do in WordPress, by using the “Add Media” button in the WordPress editor. Once there, navigate to “Create Gallery” and choose any images you want. By default, galleries will be shown as a horizontal slide. If desired, you can change this to “Mosaic” style in the plugin settings. For more information on galleries, see the Apple News Format Reference.
While this plugin is not responsible for managing advertising options for your Apple News channel, it does provide simple settings to help you prepare your content for this. Please see the Apple News Publisher and iAds documentation and terms on Apple's website for more information about advertising options on Apple News.
By default, your exported posts should be ready to include advertising content somewhere in the middle of your content. If you don't want your WordPress content to be prepared in this way, simply set the “Advertisement” option in the plugin settings to No.
Apple provides a handy tool called the News Preview tool to let you preview how posts will look in Apple News. You'll also need to install Xcode in order to use the Simulator for various iOS devices. Unfortunately there is currently no equivalent for non-macOS users.
To use the News Preview tool, open the tool and go to the News Preview menu and select Preferences.
Enter your channel ID which you can copy and paste from the Apple News API Settings.
You can then simply drag and drop any exported JSON file from the Apple News plugin. Please remember to rename the file to exactly article.json. If you are using bundled images, you must manually export those from WordPress (right clicking and saving to your desktop works fine) and place all of the images and the article.json file into a folder before dragging onto the News Preview tool.
If there are errors, the tool will let you know or simply display a check mark at the left if all is OK. You can then click on any of the available devices at the right to preview your content in that device. Note that if you make changes to the article.json file, the News Preview tool will automatically refresh the Simulator.
If you are on a Mac, we strongly suggest you try to resolve problems using the News Preview tool before reaching out for support.
Until recently, Apple News required all images to be bundled with the API request. Some hosts do not support allow_url_fopen, which is required for this functionality to work. Apple News now supports remote images so if you are experiencing any errors with images, please go to Settings > Apple News and set Use Remote Images to 'yes' under Advanced Settings. Please note that in order for this to work, your images must be publicly accessible which is the case for most sites. However, if you're testing on a local development site, your images are likely not accessible and therefore you should set this to 'no'.
If a post is stuck pending publishing to Apple News and no error notice was received in the WordPress dashboard, this likely means that a fatal error occurred during publishing. In order to find out what happened, please check your PHP error logs. This is important troubleshooting information to provide when asking for support. If you don't know where the error logs are located for your site, please ask your web host.