A bit about Apple's News Platform

News, Apple’s all new app available with iOS 9, delivers rich and immersive news, magazine, and web content to millions of users. With Apple News Format, publishers can create signature content for News with custom typography, rich photo galleries, video, and fun animations. Content is automatically optimized for both iPhone and iPad and publishers can earn revenue with iAd, Apple’s advertising platform.

The Apple News API makes it easy to connect to your existing content management system, giving you control over how your Drupal content is rendered in News, including placement of elements, background fills — as well as effects such as parallax and element transitions as the reader interacts with and scrolls through your content.

What this module does

Our Drupal Apple News Integration module makes it easy for both novice and advanced Drupal administrators to publish content to the Apple News API. In addition to allowing you to convert Drupal content into Apple News Format, our module also allows you to use one of several templates that ship with the module — or create your own Apple News Format layouts, each of which is easily configurable for iAd advertising.

The big idea with our module is that it gives you the ability to utilize layouts to define how your content translates to Apple News Format via its API.

For example, if in a given Apple News Format template, you have components for a hero image, a title, a body, and a gallery, you can define where the content for these components should come from on the Drupal side when a given node of that content type is shipped off to News.

In this example, we might tie a given Apple News Format template to your “Basic Page” Drupal content type and define that the hero image in the Apple News Format template should pull from the default image field. In addition, the template body and title should come from the node body and title respectively. Lastly, we can define that the template gallery content should come from a new multi-value image field in the content type that we’ve added to the content type for just this purpose.

Admittedly, this is a bit of an abstract concept (having a “middle” layer between your Drupal content and the Apple News API), but with this abstraction comes tremendous power. It means that when Drupal content is added or updated, our module can transform the content for that node into a format that the Apple News API can understand using the mapping you’ve defined in the template. The end result is that your content renders in News where and how you wish without any effort on your behalf after the initial (very fast) setup.

For more advanced Drupal users too

For developers who want practical Drupal examples of how to push content to the Apple News API, you can use the Apple News API library included in the library folder of the module for your own custom php or Drupal applications. It provides methods for most of the Apple News API calls, including authentication and article POST, as well as section, channel, and article GET.

Follow the steps on our blog post for quick and easy setup instructions:
http://projectricochet.com/blog/publishing-drupal-content-apple-news-api

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