Technical Requirements

FlatPlan handles the display and distribution of your content. All we need from you is the content, delivered via an RSS/Atom feed. The ‘full’ feed that comes as standard with your CMS will be a sufficient basis on which to build the feed. See below for a breakdown of our feed requirements. Please ensure your feed meets these standards.

We need your feed to be valid, well-structured and contain everything we need. By this, we mean:

• Valid: confirmed by W3C validator as ‘valid’
• Well-structured: following the guidance below
• Everything we need: includes every story you wish to appear on Apple News, contain all the metadata outlined and all the article body elements e.g. paragraphs, headings, media (visual and social).

Feed details and structure

Format

FlatPlan supports RSS 2.0 or Atom

Items

We fetch your feed regularly so we require a minimum of 50 items per page.

Character encoding

FlatPlan only supports UTF-8

Namespaces

FlatPlan requires the following namespaces

Elements(RSS 2.0)

<xml>

Specifies XML document version and character code

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<rss>

Specifies RSS version and namespaces.

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" xmlns:flatplan="https://www.wearemathematics.co.uk/flatplan-feedspec/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" > ... </rss>

<channel>

A description of your website

<title>

<link>

<pubDate>

<lastBuildDate>

<language>

<category>

<item>

<item>

Describes each article

<guid>

<title>

<link>

<pubDate>

< media:thumbnail>

<dc:creator>

<content:encoded>

<description>

<category>

<flatplan:template>

<flatplan:sponsor>

It is possible to pass gallery data. Use the custom HTML tag found in the example below.

View a sample RSS document on Github

Allowed HTML elements

Ensure the following:

• All text data should be presented as HTML with appropriate tags and be encoded as character data with UTF-8 encoding.
• All metadata included that precedes <content:encoded> and is used to describe the article is not also included in <content:encoded>(e.g. repetition of thumbnail image)
• All URL paths are absolute. This includes those used for media assets and article links.

Validation Tool

Please refer to https://validator.w3.org/feed/

Disallowed Characters

If characters which are not allowed by XML specification are included in a document, we can not parse them correctly. For more information about XML specification, please see http://www.w3.org/XML/Core/#Publications.

Date Format of <pubDate>

The value of <pubDate> must be specified in accordance with RFC822 (https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0822.txt).

Timezones

Please specify a timezone using one of the following notations:

• Greenwich Mean Time (GMT or +0000)
• Timezone to which the website belongs (eg. PST or -0800 for New York)

For example, the following are correct notation to express “May 1, 2019 15:00:00 (PST)“:

• Wed, 1 May 2019 23:00:00 GMT
• Wed, 1 May 2019 15:00:00 -0800

Language

For language settings follow these guidelines for support codes

http://www.rssboard.org/rss-language-codes

Images

Supported image types are JPEG (.jpeg or .jpg) GIF, or PNG.

The minimum size of the image must be 300 px wide x 300 px high.

The aspect ratio (width ÷ height) must be between 0.5 and 3.0.