Update: v1.0-beta4 is available for beta testing.
Happy 6th of July! We appreciated the community support and feedback at WordCamp Europe in Belgrade, and have been hard at work to refine the plugin since our v1.0-alpha release last month.
For this v1.0-beta1 release, XWP, Google and Automattic have added a few usability features and made a host of little fixes and enhancements. We hope you can provide feedback to help us polish up the plugin ahead of the formal v1.0 release in a few weeks.
👉 You can view the visually-identical AMP version of this post using 1.0-beta here right now!
Call for beta testers
Your help is needed to test the v0.1-beta1 release of the AMP plugin. Download the pre-release (amp.zip) and take it for a drive! You can checkout the 1.0-beta1-built tag from GitHub.
As usual, we have tested this plugin quite a bit, but this software is still in development. We recommend you not (quite) yet ship this to your production site (although we are using it for ourselves in production).
Found a bug? Have an idea for a feature request? Please open an issue on the Plugin Repository. For more technical details on the latest changes in 1.0-beta1, please see the wiki pages for Adding Theme Support and Implementing Interactivity.
Improving the experience in managing content for AMP
We’ve added several usability features since v1.0-alpha release.
- The return (and expansion) of the WP Admin Bar AMP menu. The CSS limits of AMP did not previously play nicely with many themes and what the WordPress admin include together. Because tree-shaking frees up some room for the admin bar to be loaded, we’re taking advantage of this in the beta release. Because of this, the admin bar feature is returning to the “frontend” experience of your website on rendered AMP HTML pages (just as they would for regular HTML Pages).
This means if you go to an AMP page, you can now click “edit post,” “new post” and so on. On paired mode, there is now a link to access the AMP version of a given URL if it is available. Additionally, you can now view the validation status of your AMP page all in the same handy interface, in the context of viewing your post or any other AMP-enabled template of your site.
A bit of plumbing underneath the hood allows us to now surface AMP error highlighting in that menu context, meaning it’s easier to spot errors on a given rendered page. To view more on what’s been done, read the notes in #1219, #1229. - Toggles for Templates that Support AMP. WordPress sites are beautifully complex, infinitely unique and full of edge cases that sometimes requires pause before diving fully in to AMP. While in previous versions you could already restrict AMP support by post type, sometimes users might have had scenarios where a portion of the site (perhaps a category page or their homepage) required custom JavaScript that when rendered would flag that page as either unsupported, or worse, in an error state for users and search engines. We’ve put some thought into creating granular controls for selecting supported templates. Now you can selectively make AMP available to a subset of your site, whether it is in paired mode or native mode. Themes can specify which templates are required to be in AMP or which do not support AMP. To read more about we’ve extended this, so feel free to read about the work completed here in #1235 and also read the new wiki section on Conditional Template Support.
- Redirection to non-AMP URL when unaccepted validation errors present. A minor, but important feature was added in #1207 and #1241: When your site knows your AMP posts and pages have a problem, we’ll make sure users don’t see non-AMP versions of that page. In short, all visitors deserve to get a decent experience of your website.
Other items of note:
- Update spec generated from amphtml core. #1172.
- Automatically unwrap noscript elements with their contents so that any fallback for no-JS browsers will automatically be made available in AMP. #1226.
- Disable AMP admin menu option when the AMP Customizer is not enabled or theme support is enabled. #1080.
- Various embed support improvements. #1128, #1202, #1218.
- Fix header image filtering and YouTube header video detection. #1208.
- Add script to create built tag. #1209.
- Tree-shaking CSS improvements. #1211, #1221.
- Move any content output during shutdown (e.g. Query Monitor output) to be injected before closing body tag. #1102.
- Fix obtaining source for widgets. #1212.
- Construct schema.org meta script by appending text node. #1220.
- Include image in schema.org data for attachment templates. #1176.
For a full list of the closed issues and merged pull requests in the 1.0 release cycle so far, see the 1.0 milestone. See also commits since 1.0-alpha1.
Happy testing!