Facebook's Instant Articles will soon be available for Wordpress sites

Automattic is planning to release the plugin as a free option for all WordPress users in time for the broader launch of Instant Articles in April.

With Facebook's eventual launch for Instant Articles to all publishers on April 12, WordPress has prepared for the deluge of interest in this new publishing platform by launching its own plugin to transform WordPress content into Instant Articles.

The social network will be hoping the WordPress plugin will help alleviate any hesitations publishers might have had in the past, in regards to the technicalities of working with Instant Articles.

But how? Facebook announced its partnership with Automattic.

At the moment, WordPress publishing platform powers more than 25% of sites on the web, and Facebook expects the solution to help millions of publishers all over the world bring the Instant Articles experience to their readers.

There are a number of Wordpress plug-ins available right now that claim to add support for Facebook's Instant Articles, as well as competitors such as Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). In this example, the third-party video player embedded in this Zap2it article from Tribune Broadcasting is beautifully adapted for the Instant Articles experience. The plugin should work out of the box but the plugin can be extended to support additional elements. But, even with the plugin, Facebook will still make a final review of the process to verify that the Instant Articles of the publishers are indeed correct and adhere to the standards of the platform.

Facebook's fast-loading Instant Articles have been slowly rolling out, but on April 12th every publisher will be able to create articles using the special format.

Currently, as seen in the link above, the plugin is available on Github and is open source; developers can submit reports directly to the Github community. Publishers will keep 70 percent of the profit from the ad, and the social networking site will keep the 30 percent revenue.

Source: Facebook's Instant Articles will soon be available for Wordpress sites