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 navigate to Sections in the top nav.
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.
Click the Add Category button next to the desired section and just start typing the name o the category. You will get an autocomplete list of matching sections. To add additional categories, click Add Category again.
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.
You can also map a theme to automatically be used for posts with a specific Apple News section, if you want to use something other than the active theme. This will only work for posts with precisely one Apple News section to avoid conflicts.
To configure this, click the Sections submenu under the Apple News menu in the admin dashboard. You'll reach the same screen shown above for mapping sections to categories.
In the rightmost column, you can select from all of the available themes. Any post matching only this Apple News section will now use the selected theme.
When finished, click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the screen to save your new mappings.