Technical Requirements

FlatPlan handles the distribution and display of your content. All we need from you is a structured data stream of website links. This is typically via an RSS/Atom feed or an API endpoint.

RSS/Atom requirements

We accept any valid RSS or Atom feed. We follow these parameters:

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Update frequency: Feeds are fetched continually, so need to be updated quickly, and uncached

Readability: Up to 60 new articles per fetch. Minimum of 10 items.

RSS Structure

We need your feed to be valid, well-structured and contain everything we need. We require the following items:

<guid> - A unique identifier of the article

<title> - Title of the article (HTML encoding is not supported)

<link> - Canonical URL of article

<date> - Date and time the article was published (must comply with RFC822).
<updated> - Date and time the article was last modified (must comply with RFC822). Must update when the article is updated.

OPTIONAL - <description> - Article excerpt

OPTIONAL - <flatplan:parameters isPreview="" isPaid="1" isSponsored="”/> - Add ‘1’ to parameters that should be set and either remove or set to any other value to prevent the parameter from being set.

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Tip: To make sure that all content is retrieved, do not exceed fetch limits.

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You can validate your feed, follow recommendations and fix any issues using a feed validation tool (example, W3C Validator)

API Requirements

{
 "data": [
   {
     "title": "ARTICLE_TITLE",
     "url": "CANONICAL_URL",
     "modifiedDate": "MODIFIED_TIME",
     "publishedDate": "PUBLISHED_TIME",
     "author": "AUTHOR"
     "tags": ["APPLE_NEWS_CATEGORY"],
   }
 ]

ARTICLE_TITLE: STRING - Title of article
CANONICAL_URL: STRING - URL to article (must remain constant for the life of the article)
MODIFIED_TIME: RFC822 DATE - Time the article was last modified
PUBLISHED_TIME: RFC822 DATE - Time the article was first published, this should remain constant
AUTHOR: STRING - Author of the article
OPTIONAL - TAGS: STRING ARRAY - Array of Apple News Sections the article should be published in

Updated articles should be moved to the first position in the data array of articles with an updated ‘modifiedDate’ field. 

Article updates

We use the <updated> tag or modifiedDate to determine whether the article was modified. 

We use the <link> tag or url to uniquely identify the article to be updated. This is required to remain the same for the life of an article.