Apple News Status N/A Pending

It’s likely that your host doesn’t support a PHP max execution time beyond 30 seconds and the request timed out. I would suggest seeing if they can raise this for you or publishing less articles at one time.

For those articles that didn’t publish, if you manually remove the meta key apple_news_api_pending for those posts, you can attempt to publish them again. I’ve logged an issue to make this more user friendly in a future version: https://github.com/alleyinteractive/apple-news/issues/117

How do I remove the meta key?

That’s a little bit outside the scope of plugin support, but you could use something like this plugin: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/post-meta-manager/ or remove the keys directly in your database.

Just wanted to let you know we’re going to handle this more gracefully in a future release:

https://github.com/alleyinteractive/apple-news/issues/117

Hello Bradford,

I ran into the same issue for a brand new post. Sync Status = Pending.

I installed plugin “Post Meta Manager” and I deleted the ‘apple_news_api_pending’ key.

The Apple News post “Sync Status” changed to “Not published”.

I updated my blog post and the Apple News post “Sync Status” = Pending again …

Although I have “enabled debugging” in the “Publish To Apple News” plugin, I don’t receive any emails (I normally do).

I downloaded the json file and tried to read it with Apple’s News Preview app. But the app won’t open it.

Later on, I saw a warning message on the API Settings page of Publish To Apple News:

The following components are unsupported by Apple News and prevented publishing: div, a, strong

Running Publish To Apple News v 1.1.5.

Any hints?

Regards,
Steve Williams

The Apple News plugin has multiple options to handle unsupported HTML. Check out the “Component Alerts” setting. Sounds like you have it set to “fail” based on that message. It can strip unsupported components silently (set to “none”) or strip them and warn you (“warn”) but still publish.

With regards to the News Preview tool being unable to open a JSON file, I’m not sure I follow the issue. Can you describe in more detail what happens? Have you reported this issue to Apple News support (we don’t support any bugs with that tool)?

Thanks.

Hi Bradford,

Thanks for your suggestion. I changed the settings from “fail” to “warn”. The article is now published.

About the News Preview tool, I recall it’s been mentioned in previous threads. I was just trying to do my homework before polling you. No matter what I do with this tool it does not work: drag and drop a .json file on it has no effect, nothing happens. And attempts to open a .json file from that tool is not possible, as the .json file is dimmed and cannot be selected. I’m using the Mac OS X version.

Regards,
Steve Williams

Please ensure your file is named exactly as article.json

Hey Bradford,

Thanks, the Apple tool can now read renamed .json … Apple could have made it simpler than that :-/

Best,
Steve Williams

Unfortunately then if the tool still isn’t working for you, you’ll have to report that to Apple News support. You’re the second person however that’s reported an issue with the tool to me (see here) so maybe there’s a known issue.

Hi Bradford,

I said above: “the Apple tool can now read” the .json …

Your solution worked.

Thanks.