Missing isPaid channel wide setting?

[kujain]

Description of the bug

We are unable to identify where to define the Apple News+ isPaid setting for all content as default. We can see them in the post editor sidebar to enable; this at each article level, but is there no way to set this globally so all published content gets marked as isPaid? If so, we are not able to locate it in the admin settings or as a configuration setting or through a hook! Can you please help? Apple has confirmed that our channel is already configured to allow this setting to be accessible.

I can see that there's an automation to define this as well. But is this the correct way to set the isPaid setting?

If so, how can we set this rule to be enabled for all content being published?

Versions:
WP 6.8.3
Plugin 2.7.2

Thanks!

Steps To Reproduce

1. Enable plugin and connect to your channel (which should be approved for Apple News+)
2. Try to locate setting to enable isPaid setting in the CMS

Additional Information

No response

[kevinfodness]

You can set it as a channel default. If you don't see the option in iCloud News Publisher, you can likely reach out to your Apple rep and have them set it for you at the channel level. The plugin is configured to use the channel default setting as its default setting, letting you do exactly what you want here without needing additional configuration in the plugin.

[kujain]

Thanks for the clarification @kevinfodness !

The Apple News representative informed me that there’s no setting within the channel (in iCloud > News Publisher) to make isPaid the default. However, he suggested that I utilize your automation functionality to establish a rule for each term in my taxonomy, ensuring that the isPaid value is applied to each. While it may be a bit tedious to set this for each category, I suppose it’s a one-time task. I wanted to share Apple News’ response with you. Thank you very much!

[kevinfodness]

Thanks for the follow-up! If you're comfortable with a code approach, you could filter the metadata and set the isPaid flag to true for all posts, which would save you the tedium of adding all of those settings in Automation and needing to update them if you ever add a category.

[kujain]

Hi @kevinfodness that's a great idea.
We are already using a number of your filter hooks to customize the content being sent to Apple news, including creating a couple of custom components. But I have not previously updated a metadata value (assuming this metadata is not an article metadata, but part of the ANF JSON structure) - can you recommend the appropriate hook we can use for this? Thanks very much!

[kevinfodness]

It would be apple_news_article_metadata. You would want to set $metadata['isPaid'] = true in the filter callback before returning the modified $metadata value.

[kujain]

I tried to use the above filter to set the metadata in this form:

function filter_update_paywall_metadata( $metadata, $post_id ) {
	$metadata['isPaid'] = true;
	return $metadata;
}

I can verify that the metadata key is added in the debugger and the downloaded article.json file:

However, it's status still remains as free in apple news :( What may be causing this metadata not to get updated? The channel is approved for paid content already...

Update: this may be happening only if we try to update an existing article in Apple news by using the json file to update. When publishing/updating an article from the CMS, it appears to work. I am not sure why that would be.

[kevinfodness]

It likely has to do with where the meta appears in what is being sent to Apple. If you're able to update from the CMS that's ideal - you should be able to go to each article to be updated in the Apple News > Articles list and click Publish to send the updated version to Apple.