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. For most publishers, the ‘full’ feed that comes as standard with their CMS will be sufficient, but below we have listed 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: features every story you wish to appear on Apple News in its entirety

Feed details and structure

Format

FlatPlan supports RSS 2.0 or Atom

Items

We fetch your feed regularly so we only require the most recent stories – 20 or 30 items will be enough

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>

<copyright>

<item>

<item>

Describes each article

<guid>

<title>

<link>

<pubDate>

< media:thumbnail>

<dc:creator>

<content:encoded>

<description>

<category>

Allowed HTML elements

Inside <content:encoded>

Ensure the following:

• Content is suitable for presentation as HTML with appropriate tags and be encoded as character data.
• Data included that precedes <content:encoded> to describe the article is not also included in <content:encoded>

View a sample RSS document on Github.

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.