WordPress AMP Plugin 0.7 Release

Native AMP + compatibility tool have arrived!

Automattic, Google and XWP are very excited to announce the v0.7 release of the AMP for WordPress plugin, available now for installation. This major release includes initial support for Native AMP, and just like our last release it adds several features that make it easy to adapt AMP into your content workflow.

We also continued the efforts from the last release to build on user requests made inside the wordpress.org plugin support forum and issues submitted to the GitHub repo, continuing our goal to give administrators more control and visibility into AMP on their WordPress sites, and the features they expect the plugin to include out-of-the-box.

Below are just a few of the items covered within the release: For a comprehensive overview what’s been added since 0.7, please see the 0.7-beta and 0.7-rc1 blog posts.

With this new version, we’ve worked on quite a few things:

Initial support for Native AMP

The 0.7 release enables themes to opt-in to Native AMP (previously called “Canonical AMP”). By default activating the plugin enables “paired mode,” with both an AMP and a standard WordPress version. But with Native AMP, there’s only an AMP version of each page, allowing themes to create an entire site in AMP using a single set of templates. We’ve worked on two themes [ampconf + travel] and proposed initial support to _s to leverage this, and encourage developers to try this new feature. Work is also underway to add AMP support to all core themes.

Improved native WordPress support

This release adds AMP support for native WordPress components. The plugin is able to play nicely with most of the default embeds supported by WordPress and renders all of the vanilla WordPress widgets as valid AMP. Further work was done in comments to not only allow a user to comment on an AMP template, but also to leverage <amp-live-list>, taking advantage of auto-updating when new comments are posted and avoiding the need to reload the page when submitting a comment.

Improved error surfacing

As a site admin or developer in WordPress, you often expect your favorite plugins to help you use their features and customize them for your website. We spent a lot of time in the past few months adding tools to make it easier to spot and fix issues causing invalid AMP on your site.

We first added notices that will notify you on post save when you might be adding content that won’t render correctly on AMP, preventing the errors in the first place. We further added a UI-based compatibility tool that groups and traces errors, allowing you to know what exactly might be causing issues on your site – be it a plugin, theme or post – and where to go from there to fix it.

Support for theme AMP templates

Added in Beta 1, themes with AMP support can opt to retain the paired mode with separate URLs for AMP content, but using theme templates as they would normally be built. This allows the theme author to easily create AMP-specific templates if desired.

Next up

AMP is designed to improve the performance of web content: our plugin’s goal is to have all the features and tools you’d need to take your site and content and easily gain the speed and feature benefits that AMP provides.

The next major release will be v1.0 and is already in active development. In short, we’re still working away at improving the plugin, from more work on out-of-the-box native WordPress support (Hint: Gutenberg!) to new features in the compatibility tool. We welcome your feedback and suggestions to the latest release, and can’t wait to bring you even more great stuff!