Facebook has been slowly rolling out Instant Articles, and the firm has now announced that the platform will be opened up to publishers around the world in time for Facebook’s F8 conference on April 12.
Facebook has joined forces with WordPress makers Automattic to help bloggers serve up pages as much as ten times faster than ever before by creating a new plugin that will be released for free to all WordPress users.
The feature-rich plugin contains tools that can help bloggers format their articles properly for Facebook’s mobile reader and engage users with options such as auto-playing videos or creating tap-to-zoom photo galleries.
Facebook’s official blog post announcing the new plugin says that more than 25 percent of sites on the internet are powered by WordPress’s open source software, which means the service will have a very broad reach.
In its own official announcement of the plugin, WordPress said: “We’ve been working with Facebook, and VIP Featured Partner agency Dekode, on a plugin which takes care of the basics. Activate it, and you’ll have a compliant feed of Posts, wrapping your core content in the markup Facebook requires.”
Once the plugin is set up, making Instant Articles will be as easily as checking a box. While standard templates are expected to support the plugin out of the box, those that have been customized might need a bit of tweaking to get everything to work properly.
Plugin will be open source to encourage customization and collaboration
A Facebook spokesperson said: “The plugin is open source, and we encourage the community to participate in its development to help publishers of all types take full advantage of the fast, native experience of Instant Articles. We will continue to iterate the plugin over the coming weeks and look forward to collaborating with the WordPress community to improve the experience.”
Facebook is encouraging those who write compatibility layers to help the plugin work with other popular plugins to share them with other users through a pull request on GitHub.
More benefits Facebook and publishers alike
Instant Articles aims to create a faster and more engaging reading experience for Facebook users, and it also provides an additional stream of ad revenue via Facebook’s electronic publishing feature.
The new plugin will enable smaller bloggers to compete with major publishers around the world. It will also help Facebook protect its interests by encouraging people to stay on Facebook for their news rather than head to other sources.
The news comes just two weeks after WordPress announced it had built a similar plugin that works with Google’s Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) service.
