Version 1.3.0 – Release Notes

Thanks for being a WP Native Articles customer!

We’ve just released version 1.3.0 of the plugin and it’s a pretty big deal for us. It’s got some major new features in that we’ve been working on hard and we’re extremely pleased we can now share them with you. Some of the release highlights are below.

Placement Manager. This has been our most requested feature since we first released the plugin and now it’s finally here! It took a long time to get right but I think we’ve cracked it. You can now add any code you like to some or all of Instant Articles in almost any position (make sure it’s valid IA code). We’ll be adding more options to the content type box in the future to make it easier to use.

Crawler Ingestion. This is a newly released method by Facebook for ingesting Instant Article content. If your article is shared and contains the correct meta tag then Facebook will automatically pull in the IA version. We can’t currently get analytics from articles added this way so the API is still the preferred method but it’s good to enable this as a backup.

Better Dashboard Analytics. We’ve re-done the analytics chart on the admin dash page. It’s now a stacked bar graph, will always show the last seven days of page views and has a total views count. As a bonus, it will also no longer show an unhelpful error message if there are no views!

Video in Header. In the Content Override tab you’ll now find a video input box. If you use videos in your posts and want to use them instead of the featured image then add the URL in here. n.b. This has to be a direct link to a video and not an embed.

Third party support. Added support for the EasyAzon, AdAce and WP Recipe Maker plugins.

We’ve also fixed a load of bugs; printf on the API page, stop ampersands getting encoded in the analytics box and auto marking related articles as sponsored (if they are!). Please try out the Placement Manager and let us know of any features you’d like to see or bugs you’ve spotted.

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Thanks