XWP, Automattic, and Google’s AMP team, has released 0.7 Release Candidate 1 of the AMP for WordPress plugin. Hinted at during AMP Conf 2018 earlier this year, 0.7 is a major release that contains significant new features.
This release adds Native AMP support for all of the default widgets, embeds, and commenting. Notifications will be triggered for posts that contain content with validation errors or if you use a theme or plugin that adds invalid AMP markup.
While earlier versions of AMP displayed content in a way that was different from a site’s theme, 0.7 creates a native experience. For example, if you visit the AMP Conf WordPress Theme Demo site on an iPhone 7, the site looks exactly the same. As you can see in the image below, you can’t tell it’s running AMP.
Before 0.7 is officially released, the development team is asking for users to put 0.7 RC 1 through its paces and report issues on the project’s GitHub page. You can download the pre-release version here.
For more information on the AMP project, listen to episode 309 of WordPress Weekly where I interviewed Alberto Medina, Developer Advocate working with the Web Content Ecosystems Team at Google, and Weston Ruter, CTO of XWP. In this interview, we covered why the project was created, its future, and its potential impacts on the Open Web.
Note that if you want to have the Native AMP experience then you currently need to add the
amptheme support flag in your theme (or via a plugin), as can be seen in the demo site’s theme repo. Without this flag enabled then the legacy post templates will be used as opposed to the templates from your theme. (See wiki docs for more info.)The Native AMP capabilities in v0.7 is really a first iteration on the feature and it is primarily aimed at theme developers who are writing new themes. In future releases it will be much easier to enable AMP on existing themes in v1.0. This release will also include theme support for all of the core themes.