Unable to fetch a list of sections error and other questions

Hi @ransomcollective—

Thank you for your interest in our plugin! I’ll do my best to answer each of your questions.

1) I believe you’re getting this message because your channel has not been approved yet. If you are still having issues after your channel is approved, then please let me know.

2a) Auto publish will only publish content as it transitions from draft to publish in WordPress, so only new content will be published to Apple News this way.

2b) Yes, you can set the filter to “Not Published” and then use bulk select and publish that way for older content.

2c) It’s not practical to select all posts and attempt to publish them all at once due to the risk of a timeout. I would recommend selecting them a page at a time and publishing all of those items, then publishing the next batch, and so on. When you use the filter for “Not Published” that should help with working through the queue.

3) As long as your content displays properly with this setting turned on (which you can validate using the News Preview tool from Apple and downloading the JSON for your article – see https://github.com/alleyinteractive/apple-news/wiki/usage#downloading-posts) then you should have no trouble using it for your articles. There are some limitations to the default Markdown format for articles that HTML support can solve. If you notice a problem with that setting turned on, please file a new ticket either here or on GitHub and we will address the underlying cause.

4) The plugin works by preparing the JSON for the article and sending it to Apple News, so the theme change would only affect articles that have been resubmitted to Apple. That would happen after making an update to an article or re-publishing, for example.

5) I believe you are correct. This feature was a request from one of our users to offer a different display option for photo-heavy articles.

6) A pull quote in Apple News is its own field, and would need to be set for each article. The pull quote will not automatically populate from the article content.

7) That’s a good question. I believe that the “fail” setting only affects the individual article being published, and that bulk publishing will continue for the articles that did not fail.

8) At first glance, I’m not seeing any issues with your content specifically, but there are a few things to be aware of. Publish to Apple News is only aware of the content in the main content box in WordPress. If you’re composing your content using custom fields, using Advanced Custom Fields or similar, or a theme builder, you may need to do some custom work in your theme to make Publish to Apple News aware of what your content should be. Also, not all video embed providers are supported, so if you are embedding videos from somewhere other than YouTube or Vimeo, you may have problems. If, as you are working through publishing your content, you encounter any issues, please let us know.

Thanks Kevin!

So interesting experience.

You are correct, our channel has not been approved yet. We had the message, “Submit at least 3 articles so we can see what you’d like to publish.” 2 submitted draft articles have been approved, one is pending.

As I mentioned, when I clicked on “Sections” I got the message “Unable to fetch a list of sections.”

Then I attempted to publish a few articles and I got the error “THERE HAS BEEN AN ERROR WITH THE API: WRONG_SIGNATURE”

I checked the Channel ID and the API Key ID and then readded the API Key Secret. I attempted to publish again and it worked. I can’t imagine I cut and pasted the API Key Secret wrong the first time, but who knows.

Then I clicked on Sections and the sections were there even though our channel is still not approved. Just FYI. Good!

So I’ve successfully published a few draft articles, but there are a few problems. I was hoping you’d have some solutions.

I have the ENABLE HTML SUPPORT set to NO. Would it have helped any of these issues if I had set this to YES?

1) Here are the examples I published to drafts and their corresponding problems:

a) PUBLISHED (This has a formatting problem. On the website, there are numbers on the examples within the article (1. 2. 3. 4.) when it was published to Apple News it read (1. 1. 1. 1.), Why would the numbers change from 1234 to 1111?
–
https://lacamasmagazine.com/2018/01/anti-inflammatory-foods.html
–
The following components are unsupported by Apple News and were removed:
div
span
div
span
div

b) PUBLISHED (At the bottom of the Apple News Article under photo gallery it says “This Slideshow requires JavaScript.” I clicked “ADD MEDIA” then “CREATE GALLERY” Apparently this isn’t going to work for Apple News. Is there another way to do a slideshow within WordPress without using javascript? It probably isn’t good to have the photos missing from the Apple News post.)
–
https://lacamasmagazine.com/2018/01/tanner-craig-earns-1st-place.html
–
The following components are unsupported by Apple News and were removed:
div
span
div
span
div
div

c) NOT PUBLISHED (I have a Spotify playlist embedded in this post. The post failed because I had JSON errors set to FAIL. I’ve now set it to warn so I’m curious how it would turn out now. Am I correct in assuming embedding Spotify playlists isn’t going to work for Apple News?)
–
https://lacamasmagazine.com/2018/01/happy-new-year-songs-for-new-chapters.html
–
The following components are unsupported by Apple News and were removed: div, span, div, span, div, iframe, div

The following JSON errors were detected and prevented publishing: Invalid unicode character sequences were found that could cause display issues on Apple News: …”

d) PUBLISHED (Same slideshow error. Apple News article says “This Slideshow requires JavaScript.”)
–
https://lacamasmagazine.com/2018/01/camas-gymnastics-team.html
–
The following components are unsupported by Apple News and were removed:
div
span
div
span
div
div

2. THEMES, I am using Default Theme. Is there a theme I can use to make our Apple News Channel look more like a magazine? Right now our posts are all exactly the same in a list with the post and the image on the right side of that post in the list.

a) I notice on GQ the first image on the page is a Large Image (full width with gutter). Then smaller images. I like this.

b) CNN varies a lot depending on which section you click you will get different views, there is a large image then it alternates seemingly randomly.

3) SUBSCRIPTION, National Geographic’s Apple News has a Subscribe option in the Header “Get all the best stories from National Geographic. SUBSCRIBE NOW”. I’d like to have that and connect it to Mail Chimp. Is there any way to have a header on our Apple News channel with your plugin?

If you have the time and you’d like me to add you as an Editor on Apple News and as an editor on the WordPress site so you can see all this for yourself I’d be happy to. Or if there is some way to send you screenshots and you feel they would be helpful, I can do that as well.

Thanks so much for your help!

Update: We had issues with the posts above as described. Apple News has not approved us due to those issues. I’ve been in correspondence with an Apple News rep and resubmitted 3 posts without those issues and I expect approval to come shortly.

The issue is, when we add a photo gallery it is Javascript based and is not compatible with Apple News.

1. Can you confirm if setting “Enable HTML support?” to YES would have helped this issue?

2. If not, can you suggest a method of creating a photo gallery that will not conflict? We really need a photo gallery in our posts, but we also need it to be compatible with Apple News.

3. I am not clear on how setting “Enable HTML support?” to YES will change our experience. Once approved we want to submit 500+ past posts, then following set them to auto, so doing it in the best way is paramount. Can you help us understand how this will help us and the risks associated?

There are also few questions in the above post we hope you will answer.

Thank you for your help.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by RANSOM COLLECTIVE.

Hi @ransomcollective—

Glad to help.

First, many of the issues that you identify should be fixed, or at least improved, by enabling HTML support. As for the errors relating to invalid Unicode sequences, you may find (when testing with the News Preview tool) that everything is displaying just fine, and the script that is performing the check is being a bit overzealous.

Themes—if you go to the Themes page of the plugin, you can select different pre-built themes. If you aren’t seeing any themes beyond the default, ensure you are running the latest version of the plugin, and then click the Install Example Themes button. These themes will give you an idea of what is possible with the tool and the Apple News format. You can further customize the theme by clicking the Edit button on the theme of your choice on the Themes page.

Larger publications like GQ and CNN are likely heavily customizing their articles for publication. You can edit the component JSON via the plugin to further refine the plugin’s output via the WordPress admin (under Apple News > Customize JSON) or you could use our system of filters via custom code in your theme to further refine the output of the plugin: https://github.com/alleyinteractive/apple-news/wiki/Action-and-Filter-Hooks

I haven’t worked with modifying the channel header myself, but this plugin is specifically for publishing your WordPress posts to your Apple News channel, and is not designed for managing other aspects of your Apple News channel. I’d follow up with Apple support about making modifications to the channel header itself.

This plugin supports default galleries built with the WordPress media modal. There is an open ticket to add support for Jetpack galleries. However, if you are using a different gallery/slideshow plugin that is JavaScript based that is changing the output of the default gallery shortcode, then that approach will not work out-of-the-box with this plugin. You can take a look at the list of filters in the link above—particularly apple_news_exporter_content_pre and apple_news_exporter_content, which allow you to modify the post content before it is sent to this plugin for parsing and organization into components.

To your final point about risks associated with HTML format—we’ve had that option available for a while now and do not have any open issues specifically related to that feature. However, I would recommend testing your content with that feature on before doing bulk publishing just to be sure.