Instant Articles are a new way for publishers to share their content across Facebook. Because they are designed for the platform, they can greatly decrease load times, allowing for a much smoother experience for readers.
A few weeks ago Facebook announced that Instant Articles will soon be available for all publishers, and while this is obviously great news, many content providers were worried about the technical issues involved.
By introducing its own WordPress plugin, Facebook is immediately providing an easy solution to millions of publishers across the globe. WordPress was chosen by Facebook as its main focus, since the platform now powers over 25% of all websites worldwide. The plugin was developed by Automattic, a parent company of WordPress.com, already behind the famous JetPack plugin.
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Chris Ackermann, Partner Engineering at Facebook, explained:
[quote]We’re always looking for ways to make it easier for publishers to share their content on Facebook, so we’ve partnered with Automattic, parent company of WordPress.com VIP, to build a free plugin for Instant Articles, which simplifies the process of generating and publishing Instant Articles from WordPress.[/quote]
Facebook has already beta-tested the plugin with a small group of publishers on WordPress, and the result is a totally seamless process to create Instant Articles.
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The example below shows how the plugin recognises images and all media-content and specifies the correct markups for the photo to render properly in the Instant Article. The photo can also expand to full screen with a simple tap, or a tilt of the phone.
The plugin also supports video formats from WordPress and native autoplay as well as social and interactive graphic embeds.
With this plugin, all publishers using standard WordPress templates will be able to create and share amazing Instant Articles as soon as they open up to all in April. How about that?
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