WPBook Updated: WordPress Facebook Plugin

WPBook, the Wordpress plugin which lets you bring your blog posts into facebook, has been updated to version 0.8.1. (You can view this very blog in Facebook as an example, assuming you’re not doing so already).

The main updates were in the 0.8 release yesterday (0.8.1 is just a bug fix to that release). In 0.8, you have the option to enable an “Invite Friends” link. See this section of the admin panel:

If that’s enabled, you’ll see something like this inside your facebook app:

People can use this to invite their friends to your facebook app. (Of course you can also use it to invite your friends to your own app - 15 per day).

Grab the updated version from the WordPress Plugin Directory or directly from here.

If you’re interested in getting involved in development / support of this plugin and others (especially related to educational use of WordPress), check out Scholarpress.

Updated WordPress Facebook Plugin

(As of 8/20 - updated again, to 0.7.5).

WPBook, the WordPress for Facebook plugin which Dave Lester and others at Scholarpress originally created and which I’ve contributed some to, has been updated again.

Version 0.7.4, which I just tagged in subversion (so it should be showing up in the Wordpress plugins directory by the time I post this) includes the following:

• Works with WordPress installs in subdirectories, using ABSPATH to ensure the right includes get called
• Fixed for the “new Facebook” javascript but remains compatible with “old Facebook” javascript as well (as described here)
• Removed hard coded reference to MyAvatarsNew(); and downgraded to WordPress standard avatars
• Fixed the (previously hard coded) offset for permalinks to be dynamic based on blog’s home url

All in all, this should be a much more stable version for most folks.

Note: If you use the “upgrade automatically” feature in WordPress, you must remember to copy the wp-facebook folder from /wp-content/plugins/wpbook/ to /wp-content/themes/ - it must reside at /wp-content/themes/wp-facebook in order for the plugin to work correctly.

You can get the new version from my plugin page or from the WordPress plugin directory.

Scrabulous down for the count?

Guess the negotiations with Hasbro and Electronic Arts didn’t go so well. It was really my primary reason for actually logging in to Facebook.

Enterprise Portals, Collaboration, and the Web

I’m in San Diego this week for the Enterprise³ conference, which the organizers describe thusly:

Enterprise³ consists of three separate, but related, components:

• Enterprise Web and Information Management Conference – a conference that provides technology managers and IT staff with a detailed guide to selecting and implementing technology and product innovations in Web 2.0, portals, collaboration, information management and access, enterprise search, and service-oriented architectures.
• Enterprise Portal and Collaboration Business Summit – an event designed for business users and technology managers that employs case studies and best practices to show attendees how companies today are gaining business benefit from the latest enterprise portal and business collaboration technologies and products.
• Microsoft SharePoint in the Enterprise Forum – this forum provides IT staff with the information they need to deploy a Microsoft SharePoint environment that can be integrated with enterprise-level information management and business collaboration systems.

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BarCamp Boston 3 Presentation (WordPress to Facebook and Back)

I presented yesterday at BarCamp Boston 3 on the topic of WPBook, the WordPress plugin for pulling blog posts into Facebook and letting people comment on them with their Facebook identities.

Here’s the presentation file: WordPress to Facebook and Back (Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license)

As always, you can get the latest code here, or see it in action on Facebook.

I found it was very difficult to do a 30 minute presentation here - 45 would have been better, and an hour would have been perfect. I should have spent more time focused on three key aspects: the core WordPress plugin API, the Facebook API, and the bigger picture of how they relate to each other.

That way I could have shown, for example, the WordPress loop and how that works, and some of the Facebook PHP client, and how a user’s request goes through Facebook to your WordPress blog and back to their browser.

I’ll try to set a bit more context in my Twitter talk later today, though 30 minutes will be a challenge there as well.