How to connect your Ghost site to Apple News

Newly out in alpha over on the Spectral Web Services Tools for Ghost page: 🎉An Apple News integration! This one was a bear to build, because Apple News Format is its own thing, and although it sort of looks like HTML, it isn't. So I needed to translate every single Ghost card (and every single variant) into an Apple News component. You know how it always seems like it'd be nice to have just a few more cards built into the editor? There was a lot of swearing and not really feeling that.

(I'm better now, and back to thinking it'd be super nice to have another half-dozen or so cards to give us more publishing options.)

OK, enough whining, what's it do?

Features

• Triggered on post published event in Ghost, or manually.
• Go straight to published, or save drafts for review later.
• Configuration options for how it handles paywalled content, including publishing or protecting your members-only content. (Yes, it understands the preview line, too.)
• Layout configuration options
• Publish everything, or use tags to control what syndicates
• Compatible with all Ghost cards (er... except HTML and Codepen)

Caveats

• It's in alpha. There might be bugs. 🐛
• The toggle card doesn't toggle - it starts open and stays there. (Apple News just can't do that.) Of course, it doesn't toggle in email, either!

Connect an Apple News account to Ghost

1. Log in at icloud.com, do the 2FA dance, and navigate to "News Publisher". (If you don't see it as an option, then you account hasn't been invited to Apple News. This integration can't fix that for you. Sorry.)
2. Follow these instructions to get your channel id, key, and secret: https://support.apple.com/en-jo/guide/news-publisher/apd88c8447e6/1.0/icloud/1.0
   In brief: Click settings > connect CMS > #2 API Key. You need all three values for the next steps. Note: If your secret isn't shown, you need to click "Replace API Key" which will break any existing integrations until you update them.) Leave that tab open while you do the next steps.
3. Head over to the Apple News Integration page at https://tools.spectralwebservices.com/ . Log in and set up your site if you haven't already. You'll need your Ghost admin API key and URL from /ghost > settings > integrations > custom > new integration
4. Go to the Apple News section of the tools site. In the install tab, copy and paste in those values from icloud.
5. Publish something on Ghost! Or... head over to the Activity tab and manually publish some things. I don't currently backfill, but you can use the manual button to some content.
6. Your content should show up on the Tools > Apple News Integration > Activity tab within a minute or so, and then within your site's Apple news publisher page (accessible through iCloud.com) a minute or two after that. The activity tab gives you a direct link to the article which you can use on an Apple device to view the article directly.
7. Check out your articles using the direct link to each (on an Apple product only), or use the channel link (available in Apple News Publisher) to link directly to your channel. You can do this before your channel is approved.
8. Once you've got multiple articles published and looking great, you can request to have Apple News channel available to the public, through whatever method you were told to use when you got your Apple News invitation.

Help wanted!

I would really appreciate hearing from you on whether this integration does what you need it to do, or if not, which knobs and settings are missing.

What will it cost?

The Apple News integration is eventually going to be on a paid tier, in a package with a bunch of other super useful tools for Ghost. (Probably the $30/month tier, but note the 50% discount available for small news sites.) You're welcome to try it out for a few months at no charge while it's in alpha/beta phase, but eventually I will need to actually start recouping the development time that went into it. I've got bills too. 😊