Changelog v.4.0.0

I quote this request.

Also, can we upgrade safely from 3.3.5 to 4.0.0? Or are there breaking changes? It would be very gentle to spare this kind of information when relasing big plugin updates.

Thank you

Thanks for raising this up.

That’s a fair point, we have not generated a changelog since we’ve automated our release process, but I’m fixing this today.

I’m creating a changelog for this version and including the changelog as a step on the release script.

You can upgrade safely to v4, it’s not a breaking change.

The biggest change is that plugin does not connect to the API using an access-token and a Facebook App anymore, instead it uses the new meta tag “ia-markup” to tell Facebook’s scrapper to ingest the articles. The only required field on the settings now is the Facebook Page ID, which you already have saved if you use v3.

Thanks for the feedback!

Hi,

A changelog was created from the Pull Requests on the repository and is available on 4.0.1.

Thank you!
Diego

Thank you Diego for the update on the changelog.

The API-no-more thing is quite huge. I had my post changes reflected immediately in insta library after doing a post Update because of the API, but with v4 when I’m going to modify a post I must wait for the scraper to re-ingest/update the article in library? am I correct?

I think I’m not ready yet to the update, I was relying on the API for other things, also I can’t find information on this ia-markup meta tag, is not documented yet?

Thanks for fast response!

Hi @drlightman,

We do trigger a re-scrape automatically when you modify a post, so it should work exactly as before. What else do you use the API for?

Thank you,
Diego

I was working on a cron/cli script to perform some tasks/transformations on post content on regular basis, at which point an update was required and also an IA automatic resubmission, for that I digged into the plugin code and found I could use:

Instant_Articles_Publisher::submit_article($post_id, $post);

So I’m wondering now if with this big changes in v4.0 I may still be able to use that call.

Interesting use case, @drlightman, and as you guessed we don’t have this class anymore.

What kind of transformation do you wish to make on your cron/cli?

With the new flow, Facebook will automatically fetch the latest version of your Instant Article by following the added meta tag “ia-markup” on your HTML.

That means the plugin do not submit articles anymore, it simply changes the markup served and trigger a re-scrape.

If you want to customize the Instant Article output, you can use the WordPress filter ‘instant_articles_transformed_element’ to manipulate the InstantArticle instance before it is rendered.

Thank you,
Diego

What kind of transformation do you wish to make on your cron/cli?

It’s a video conversion, from a local uploaded mp4 in [video ...] shortcode version toward an iframe embed, which requires to automatically upload the mp4 to an our video hosting website and then retriving the iframe embed of that video to replace the original [video ...] shortcode.

I guess I’ll have to test the v4 in a local installation then, maybe the way v4 works would avoid the manual IA submission as I planned (not implemented yet, fortunately, so no work will be lost, just the little time spent digging into the code of v3).

• This reply was modified 7 years, 8 months ago by DrLightman.

Hi,
I have alse one question. I have permanent text under every post and want to stylize it – such as justify alignment, size of a logo and more. Is it possible somehow?