Sections
Sections allow you to publish posts to Apple News in different areas of interest. These are similar to categories in WordPress.
Sections are created in iCloud Publisher. To create a new section, go to iCloud Publisher and click on Edit Sections on the left side under Articles.
Click the blue Add Section link at the bottom to add new sections. Please note that although your default channel can be renamed, it can never be deleted. You can also reorder sections to change the order in which they appear both in your channel and within the Publish to Apple News plugin.
For more information on iCloud Publisher, please visit Apple News Support.
You can manually choose sections when publishing, but if you would always like content from specific categories to publish to specific Apple News sections, you can configure this to happen automatically.
To configure this, click the Sections submenu under the Apple News menu in the admin dashboard.
You will see a list of all the sections you've defined in iCloud Publisher. For each one, you can add one or more WordPress categories. When posts have these categories selected, they will automatically publish to these sections.
You can also set the same category to multiple sections. If the same category is set to multiple sections, posts with matching categories will be published to all sections mapped to that category.
Click the Add Category button next to the desired section and start typing the name of the category. You will get an autocomplete list of matching sections. To add additional categories, click Add Category again.
Any posts without a matching category will be published to your primary channel.
For each section, you can map a theme as well. Any articles published to that section will use the theme you specify. However, if a post will publish in multiple sections due to category mapping, which theme is used will be determined by the Priority setting. If an article will be published to multiple sections, the theme that it uses will be determined by the section with the highest priority value of the sections that it will post to. (Articles may appear in multiple sections, but each article can only be displayed with one theme.)
When finished, click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the screen to save your new mappings.
For advanced developers, please note that the taxonomy used for mapping can be filtered.
If you update your sections list in iCloud and do not want to wait for the cached sections list to clear in WordPress, you can force the cache to clear by navigating to Apple News > Sections, then clicking the Refresh Section List button at the bottom.