Google has updated its AMP plugin for WordPress, to support the ability to create AMP Stories with the help of the Gutenberg editor.
Google last year introduced AMP Stories – an immersive visual storytelling format to help publishers to provide more interactivity to rich media content. Now, it’s expanding its WordPress AMP plugin to allow users to create AMP Stories with the power of the CMS’ new editor in version 5.0 – Gutenberg.
Of course, you can create AMP Stories without the plugin, but Gutenberg’s drag-and-drop UI makes it really easy to do so. As Weston Ruter explains in the recent post about the experimental feature,
“In Gutenberg everything is a block. This makes it easy to create rich post layouts, provide enhanced authoring tools (word count, color contrast, document outlines, etc.), and extend with custom blocks.”
So, what can you do with the plugin? Quite a lot actually. You will be able to create and reorder AMP Story pages by dragging and dropping blocks, manage content as part of WordPress, create new elements, such as text, videos, images, change the background colour and opacity, or add a gradient – on the fly. You can also animate the text, rotate it, and even select a Google font.
Creating your first story is really easy. As soon as you have the AMP Stories branch installed, you can begin. You can download the preview release here.
It’s a great time to start creating AMP Stories, as Google even recently added a specific section for search results in its browser showcasing the format.
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