Open Parenthesis » facebook

Testing Facebook PHP SDK 3.1.1

John — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 21:19:22 +0000

OK, no more testing, no more publishing and unpublishing this page.

WPBook 2.3 is released. This uses the same Facebook SDK (3.1.1) as WPBook Lite which I just released last weekend – this will make it easier to manage both.

It will also let me start work on adding more features to the plugin- a more stable base to work from.

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Third test. Should publish just to WPBook page.
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Oops. That’s why we test. Typo in publish_to_facebook.php fixed.
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Sorry for the testing post. Just working on an update to WPBook 2.3, including an update to the Facebook SDK, and need to make sure in the process I haven’t busted anything.

This should post to personal profile and to page wall.
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Facebook Graph API – Post Versus Link

John — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 20:29:59 +0000

Difficult Choices. (Photo by Beppie K, cc-by-nc-sa license)

Over in the WordPress Support forums for WPBook, WPBook user TheCitizen was asking about the absence of “share” links on Wall Excerpts posted via WPBook. I responded that in my experience posts made via the API (by an App, rather than by the user directly) don’t get “share” links inside Facebook.

He pointed to Facebook Page Publish, a WordPress plugin which also cross-posts to Facebook (though it does not import comments). Posts made via this plugin do get a share link.

Digging in a bit, I realized that Facebook Page Publish uses the Link object in the Facebook Graph API, whereas WPBook and WPBook Lite both use a Post object.

What’s the difference? That’s what I’m trying to determine now.

Links are posted with these fields (ref):

link
message

The rest of the values “are taken from the metadata of the page URL given in the ‘link’ prarameter.

Posts are created with these fields (ref):

message
link
picture
name
caption
description
actions
privacy
object_attachment

So Posts are more complex than Links, whereas Links rely on getting the Facebook metadata from the page returned by the link.

How does each appear, on the timeline and in the news feed?

Here’s the same link, posted twice, using the Facebook Graph API explorer – the first time (the lower box) is as a Link, the second time is as a Post:

That is how they look on the timeline – logging in as another FB user and looking at News Feed, I could not even see the Post type, only the Link type:

Though I’m certain that in the past I have seen items in the newsfeed which were posted as Posts. (Maybe it was that I’d just posted the same link as a link, so Facebook was hiding the second item as spam? I’ll retry with something different).

(Update: here’s what a Post type object looks like in the Newsfeed – the item for this blog post):

A few things to note:

The nicer excerpt – “We are an interactive agency . . . ” was pulled from the page being linked to by Facebook themselves, not entered by me. In the case of WPBook or WPBook Lite posts, we want to provide the full excerpt, not have it pulled from the link destination.
The image – again, this was pulled from the link destination. In the case of WPBook or WPBook lite posts, the image would be provided by the app (the featured image from the post) not grabbed from the destination link – but it looks the same in both.
In the case of the link type, the “via the Graph API Explorer” is next to the poster’s name, but in the Post type it is down at the bottom above the action links
The Link type gets a “share” action link, while the Post type only gets “Like” and Comment.”

Given all this, plus the fact that I found it hard to find the Post type in the newsfeed of an account I know follows me, I wonder if we shouldn’t switch to posting blog posts as the “Link” type.

The challenge is that the “link” type depends on the target blog having the right open graph metadata in place already (unless wpbook / wpbook lite try to actually provide that metadata).

When Facebook visits the link, it looks for Open Graph Metadata – which your blog’s theme may or may not provide.

Using the “Post” object allows WPBook / WPBook Lite to control the message being sent to Facebook more explicitly, rather than relying on metadata.

The part that worries me though is how frequently “Post” type objects get into News Feeds. Since Facebook controls the algorithm which decides what, out of the hundreds or thousands of possible posts in any given user’s feed, to show that user, I have no way of knowing whether object type (Post vs Link) has any impact.

Anyone have data on that to share?

WPBook and WPBook Lite: More Options, More Flexibility

John — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 21:04:08 +0000

A few months ago I discussed the Future of WPBook in this space, specifically what to do about Facebook’s new requirement that all applications providing canvas pages or page tabs had to be accessible via SSL. As I outlined it then, I saw the options as:

Eliminate the canvas page and tab altogether – make WPBook just focus on cross-posting and comment import, thus potentially eliminating the SSL requirement?

Make it optional – keep the canvas page and tab, but make them optional – only for users who want them and have the necessary SSL certificate

Fork the plugin – make a version of the plugin which works like the current model, but also a second (WPBook Lite?) that only does cross posting and comment import? That way we could have separate directions for each to simplify setup confusion

Stop developing WPBook – There are a number of other plugins which do Facebook posting, and at least one which does Facebook comment importing (probably more). Is it worth continuing to develop WPBook if better alternatives exist?

Ultimately, I settled on Option 3: Fork the plugin, and create a lighter-weight version which did not include the canvas page or tab. The result is WPBook Lite, available now in the WordPress Plugin Repository.

Should I use WPBook, or WPBook Lite?

I suspect this will be the main question folks will face, so here’s a quick comparison table:

Feature	WPBook	WPBook Lite
Cross Post WordPress Blog Posts to Facebook	X	X
Post WordPress Blog Posts to Facebook Profiles (Walls), Pages, and Groups	X	X
Import comments made against Facebook Excerpt Posts to WordPress as native comments	X	X
View WordPress Blog inside Facebook as Canvas Page Application	X
Add WordPress blog as a tab to a Facebook Page	X
Requires WordPress blog be accessible via SSL (HTTPS)	X

Basically, if you are able to access your blog via HTTPS, and you WANT the view of the blog inside Facebook as a canvas application, or you want the page tab feature, you should use WPBook.

If your blog is not accessible via HTTPS, or you don’t want the view of the blog inside Facebook / page tab, then you should be happier with WPBook lite.

I’ll be updating the instructions over at WPBook.net shortly to reflect Facebook’s new look for developer settings shortly, and will also differentiate between WPBook and WPBook Lite. In theory, configuring WPBook Lite should be significantly simpler for most users.

If you’re already using WPBook and shift to WPBook Lite, you will need to regrant permissions.

Migrating from WPBook to WPBook Lite:

View your WPBook settings page, and write down your profile ID as well as the IDs of any pages/groups to which you want to cross publish.
Deactivate WPBook (but don’t delete it yet)
Install and Activate WPBook Lite
Set up a new Application for WPBook Lite – this time you should only need the “Website” settings under Integration, not any of the “App on Facebook” section settings
Visit the WPBook Lite settings page in WordPress, fill out the required fields (APP ID, Secret, your profile ID), and save the form
Re-visit the WPBook Lite settings page, where you should now see an opportunity to grant appropriate permissions

If done correctly, WPBook Lite should pick up right where WPBook left off.

If you run into problems, please comment in the appropriate WordPress Support Forums: WPBook or WPBook Lite.

The Future of WPBook

John — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:07:00 +0000

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the future of WPBook, and wanted to give a quick update. There are two key factors making me rethink the whole approach.

Pittsfield in the Near Future (from Cameo Wood on flickr, cc-by-nc license)

The first is a change Facebook has made, requiring SSL certificates for “all Canvas and Page tab applications.” (They announced this change earlier this summer, as part of the bizarrely Orwellian “Operation Developer Love” but it went into effect as of October 1st).

This is a problem because many WPBook users’ blogs are not available via https connections (including my own), and with this new Facebook change their WPBook implementation will fail, though how exactly that will be manifest isn’t clear to me yet (see below). Getting an SSL certificate for your blog isn’t an insurmountable task, but if you run your blog on cheap shared hosting, the costs of an SSL certificate (and the dedicated IP it requires) can be nearly as much as you’re paying for hosting! It’s also a task that the non-technical user will find horribly confusing.

The second is a recent report showing that:

Using a 3rd party API to update your Facebook Page decreases your likelihood of engagement per fan (on average) by about 80%

The study results suggest that one of WPBook’s core functions – posting automatically to your wall (or the wall of a fan page, group, or application) whenever new blog posts are published – might not even be a good idea to begin with.

Facebook posts direct versus via 3rd party APIs (Edgeranker study)

If third-party automated postings get de-prioritized by Facebook, you might be better off using a Facebook share button and manually cross posting to Facebook each time you publish. On the other hand, maybe the reason third-party automated postings get less attention is because people post more ~~crap~~ weak content that way. (If what the 10 most popular third-party apps post is lots of nonsense about games, thinly veiled ads, and self-promotion, maybe that is what the study results show people are ignoring – not that good relevant content posted by automated applications gets ignored).

So, what’s the way forward?

The scenario I’m imaging is to split apart the functions of the current WPBook and make some portions optional.

WPBook currently does four main things:

Expose a view of your blog as a Facebook application (a canvas page or set of pages). Basically this is an iframe inside Facebook containing your blog content, drawn by WordPress in a theme supplied by WPBook, to make it look more like other Facebook pages.
Expose a view of your blog as a “tab” for use on Facebook pages. This is also iframe based, but a bit different in terms of what is allowed in that tab.
Cross-post to Facebook whenever a new blog post is published. (To your personal profile wall, or to the wall of a Fan Page, Group, or Application, or some combination thereof).
Import comments made against those wall posts, and make them WordPress comments

I believe that the Facebook requirement of SSL only affects numbers 1 and 2 of this list. Even in the current WPBook, if you set “use external permalinks” then users never need know your application canvas page exists – they will just click on the links in wall posts and be taken to your (external) blog. Users without SSL certificate capability (or interest) could still get the benefits of 3 and 4 without having to worry about 1 and 2.

(It’s not clear to me right now how this would impact setup of WPBook-based applications. Facebook’s developer blog clearly indicates that canvas and page-tab applications will require SSL, but that would seem to imply other kinds of applications will not. Is it just a question of choosing a different application type during setup in Facebook? The whole app creation flow has changed so many times it is hard to keep track – maybe it is a question of unchecking some of the boxes in the dialog below?)

New Facebook App Creation Options

So the question becomes, is it worth it to keep WPBook trying to do 1 & 2 above?

Originally this was all WPBook did, and it seemed to me quite useful and distinct from any other Facebook related plugin. In essence you could use WPBook this way to drive a whole in-Facebook experience and never require (or even let!) users go to the blog outside of Facebook (though preventing them from accessing the blog outside Facebook would require some extra work on your part).

Open Parenthesis, as seen outside Facebook (left) and inside Facebook (right) - click for full size

But most users, it seems to me, were confused by this “Facebook view of my blog” approach. They wanted cross posting, and comments import, but didn’t like the application view of the blog (which required all users viewing blog content to consent to application permissions) or worried about it taking traffic away from their external blog.

Should I:

Eliminate the canvas page and tab altogether – make WPBook just focus on cross-posting and comment import, thus potentially eliminating the SSL requirement?
Make it optional – keep the canvas page and tab, but make them optional – only for users who want them and have the necessary SSL certificate
Fork the plugin – make a version of the plugin which works like the current model, but also a second (WPBook Lite?) that only does cross posting and comment import? That way we could have separate directions for each to simplify setup confusion
Stop developing WPBook – There are a number of other plugins which do Facebook posting, and at least one which does Facebook comment importing (probably more). Is it worth continuing to develop WPBook if better alternatives exist?

My concern with option 2 (“make it optional”) is just that configuring WPBook is already too complex for many users, given the variety of ways Facebook can be used and the variety of ways WPBook can be configured. Adding yet another set of variants (which would change not just what you have to set inside WordPress but also what choices you make when setting up the corresponding Facebook application) will only increase complexity and therefore support requests, which I honestly just don’t have the time to answer as quickly or extensively as I’d like.

My concern with option 3 (“fork the plugin”) is similar – more work for me, when I’ve had difficulty keeping up with plugin maintenance and maintenance of the instructions as Facebook constantly changes their application settings pages. If maintaining one plugin is difficult, maintaining two will be more so, even if they share some segment of the code base.

So option 1 (“eliminate”) is perhaps the simplest. (I say “perhaps” because I haven’t looked into it in depth yet – how hard will it be to untangle all the permission setting and checking logic, which is currently using a canvas page to display the current permissions? How will that change existing applications built using WPBook?).

But once that’s gone, what distinguishes WPBook from all the other Facebook posting plugins?

The fourth option would be to just declare WPBook obsolete. Existing WPBook installations work, if the user’s blog supports SSL. Currently if users browse Facebook in https mode, my own WPBook-powered applications just don’t work, because I don’t have SSL certificates for any of my blogs – just not worth the effort. But I’m ok with that.

It ~~may be~~ seems that new WPBook users will find they can’t set up a Facebook application (necessary to use WPBook) without an SSL certificate, and if they want to have cross-posting and comment import they’ll need to use an alternative approach, but a quick search of the plugin repository suggests other options are plentiful.

I’d love to hear from you all – especially if you are WPBook users (it’s had over 100,000 downloads, but I’ve no idea how many are in active use).

Are you using the “Canvas Page” or “Tab Page” views inside Facebook? If so, do you have an SSL certificate for your blog? Would you miss these views if WPBook were revised to eliminate them?
Have you evaluated other WordPress plugins for accomplishing the same thing? Did they work, or what issues did you run into?

As always, comments (and patches!) welcome.

Facebook Platform Updates, SSL, and WPBook

John — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 17:45:48 +0000

Road to nowhere (Photo by Matthew Connor, cc-by-nc license)

Back in January, I got an unexpected flurry of WPBook support requests, and ultimately discovered they were the result of Facebook’s decision to allow people to browse Facebook in HTTPS mode.

As part of that change, Facebook introduced some new settings: “Secure Canvas URL” and “Secure Tab URL,” which would enable https connections throughout your Facebook application.

WPBook mostly worked with these two variables properly set (thanks to cshiflet for this patch).

Now, however, Facebook has announced they will require ALL apps to support https:

Today, we are announcing an update to our Developer Roadmap that outlines a plan requiring all sites and apps to migrate to OAuth 2.0, process the signed_request parameter, and obtain an SSL certificate by October 1.

What will this mean for WPBook users?

Unfortunately, my guess is that many WPBook users are not prepared to install an SSL certificate and accept https traffic on their blogs. (SSL certificates typically require that your blog have a unique IP address and cost extra at shared hosting facilities).

If you are unable to install an SSL certificate for your blog, and enable https based browsing of it, you may be unable to use WPBook after October 1, 2011 (or whenever Facebook decides to actually enforce this migration step).

More to come as we get closer to that date.

Social Commerce Presentation from Magento Imagine Conference

John — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 17:48:03 +0000

I shared the slides from my social commerce talk at the Magento Imagine conference earlier, but now the video has been posted:

I’ve also taken the audio from that video and converted the SlideShares slides into a screencast, which syncing the audio to the slides:

With Friends Like These, Who Needs Revenue?

View more webinars from John Eckman

It’s much more useful this way than just the slides were.

WPBook 2.2.1

John — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 21:33:27 +0000

Try Again (Photo by Samantha Marx, cc-by license, http://www.flickr.com/photos/spam/3355834452/)

Spent some quality time this weekend with WPBook. As a result, I just released version 2.2.1. (There was briefly a 2.2 release, but something was corrupted in that version of the SVN repo, so use 2.2.1 instead).

Included in 2.2.1:

Read More is back. Re-enabled the “Read More” action link. Unfortunately, because of a Facebook API bug wpbook can’t add more than one action link to a post, so no “share” button on wall posts until that is fixed. (Facebook doesn’t add the Share link automatically to posts from the Graph API and there’s currently no way to make that happen other than manually adding it as a link, but I think the “Read More” link is more important.)
Post to Group Walls. Added posting options for Group walls, and comment import form Group walls. Because of the way the Facebook API has changed, posting to a Group feed is distinct from posting to a Page’s feed, and requires different syntax.
Controlled debugging. Limit the size of debug files created to 500k, so that users who enable debugging and then forget won’t have an unlimited file growing every hour. Also made the debug constant more specific to WPBook so as not to interfere with other plugins potentially using DEBUG as a constant
Fopen errors. Clean up DEBUG for cases where permissions fail or file is not writeable
Facebook::$CURL_OPTS . Made “disable ssl verification” an option so that only users who need it will have it and others won’t get conflict
Required fields are required. Cleanup to the admin screens in general, more clarity around what is required and better language on the admin screens about what is being checked. (Thanks BandonRandon for patches)
Better check permissions. Improved “Check permissions” page, to show what options mean and enable links to view profiles, pages, links to validate IDs are correct.
Added wpbook logo which had been missing
Fix for get_themes() issues with WordPress 3.0.1 through 3.0.5

I realize from the activity in the forums that many users are having trouble with the 2.1 and later WPBook – but I believe all the known errors have been fixed, and most are due to misconfiguration.

A few configuration notes that might help:

Your application ID, secret, canvas URL, and Profile ID must be correct or nothing else is going to work. If you load your application canvas page and you don’t see the WPBook theme, but see just your blog in an iframe (unchanged), then something is wrong in your Facebook Application setup, your WPBook setup, or in a plugin conflict.
Your personal FB profile is absolutely required, even if you don’t plan to publish to your profile’s wall. It is through the FB profile that the access_token for publishing to pages is retrieved. If your FB profile ID is wrong, nothing else is going to work.
Any time you change the Profile ID, the Page ID, or the Group ID to which you are trying to publish, you must visit the Check Permissions page and will most likely need to regrant permissions. Again, if permissions aren’t working, nothing else is going to work.

If you’re stuck, please open a new thread in the wordpress forums and provide the following debugging info:

The URLs of your Facebook Application and your blog outside FB
The contents of your check permissions page – verbatim
What you are trying to publish to – profile, page, group – by ID and by URL
What error messages you are seeing, in the WordPress interface and/or in the PHP error log

With the right information, we will be able to get it working.

Thanks

WPBook 2.1.4 Released

John — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 21:21:31 +0000

Code Bug (Photo by Guilherme Tavares, cc-by license, http://www.flickr.com/photos/guitavares/1703252007/)

Just released WPBook 2.1.4.

Two key bugfixes in this release:

Comment Imports. In changing to the Graph API I needed to add an access_token to the FQL calls I’m using to retrieve comments from non-public streams.
Facebook Avatars for Pages. Given that you can now comment on wall posts as a page (by using the “use Facebook as page” option if you are the admin of a page) some of your comment authors in FB might be pages themselves. This fix will get the right FB avatar for them, eliminating what was otherwise a broken link image.

There should not be any need to regrant permissions or change any Facebook settings in this release.

Thanks to all the users who’ve provided feedback (and debug files!) in the forums.

WPBook 2.1.2 Release

John — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 21:50:53 +0000

Quick update – just tagged and released WPBook 2.1.2 – should show up in the repository shortly.

Note that if you’ve already made the changes described in upgrading from 2.0.x to 2.1 you do not have to redo them, though you will have to regrant permissions (in order to fix #s 1 and 2 below).

Three significant bug fixes:

Access Token storage. In 2.1 and 2.1.1 I had been storing the access_token Facebook returns after granting permissions in the user_meta table, which worked, but only if you were always publishing in WordPress as the same user who granted permissions. (The same WordPress user_id). Now this gets stored in the options table and works regardless of who is logged in, which makes more sense for the publish action in the first place.
Publish as a page. This required getting the “manage_pages” permission, so you will need to regrant permissions (visit the WPBook options page, click on the “Check Permissions” link inside the Stream/Wall options section, and then click on “regrant permissions” on the resulting page inside Facebook). Basically once you’ve granted “manage_pages” permissions, WPBook looks for the page you’ve identified as a target, and fetches and stores a new access_token that is specific to acting as that page. This access token is then used to publish to the page’s wall, so that they appear to come from the page, not from your FB user id.
Post Thumbnails. This was more badly broken than I thought – not sure how it worked in my testing. (My guess is that FB grabs an image even when you don’t provide one, and may have accidentally grabbed the right one when I test-posted). But it works now, provided you have actually indicated a post-thumbnail (or “featured image” as it is now called in the WordPress admin).

What may still be outstanding is support for WordPress 3.0.1 and potentially other versions between 2.9 and 3.1. Please do open a thread in the forums if you are using an older version of WordPress or having other issues.

The Problem with Time on Site

John — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 13:48:20 +0000

Time is Running Out (Photo by Andrea Zamboni, cc-by-nc license, http://www.flickr.com/photos/zamboniandrea/170324255/)

In a previous post (Metaphors That Mislead Us: User, Audience, Visitor, Shopper?), I discussed the way in which the terms we use to describe the people who interact with our web-based applications can shape our thinking, encouraging some approaches and limiting or making others highly unlikely.

Another way in which the language we use to talk about web applications fails us is in the notion of “time on site” which analytics vendors have led us to believe means something other than what it really means.

Time on site (or Time on Page) really means something more like:

Time elapsed between multiple HTTP requests in a sequence from a single IP address within a given period of time.

Nothing more, nothing less. The “given period of time” is the session length, which is configurable but is commonly 30 minutes or an hour.

In other words, if I request one page, and only one page, from your web application/page/site, my “time on site” is exactly 0 (or undefined). Doesn’t matter if I spend 20 minutes reading the article, if I don’t request a second page, the web analytics software has no way to know how much time I spent “on” that page.

If I request a page – but open it in a background tab, as I often do, along with 10-15 other things I’m going to read throughout the day – and the view that browser tab 25 minutes later, and click on a link within it, requesting a second page – this will register as me having spent 25 minutes “on” the original page.

What web analytics software knows what URLs have been requested in a browser from an IP address. (If I use multiple browsers, each of them is treated by analytics as a distinct user, because each browser gets a unique cookie, though multiple windows or tabs in a single browser is treated as one user). The software has no knowledge of what the user behind the browser is actually doing during that time.

This doesn’t mean “time on site” is meaningless, precisely – just that it needs to be carefully considered in a broader context and with an understanding of what the label conceals.

The most common misuse of this, in my opinion, is the discussion of Facebook, and the amount of time users spend each day “in” or “on” Facebook. One of the reasons retailers are so excited about F-Commerce is because of the amount of time potential shoppers spend “in” or “on” the site, because they’re imagining Facebook as a location – as though there’s a giant Mall of the World (even bigger than Mall of America) with 600 million plus people trapped in it for 4 hours a day, yearning to spend some money.

Mall of America (Photo by jpellgen, cc-by-nc-nd license, http://www.flickr.com/photos/jpellgen/778968733/)

But are people really in Facebook in the way this suggests?

I’m in danger here of assuming my own experience is representative, but I know for myself and everyone I’ve talked to about this Facebook is just one among many things open and active on my laptop (or iPad, or phone) at a given time. The average user often has Facebook open in multiple tabs as she reads links friends have sent her, engages in comment threads, and jumps between webmail and other applications. Add them all up, and we’re all certainly spending significant time during the day engaging with Facebook (requesting urls from facebook.com). But we’re not stuck there: we’re skipping in and out – switching to other web pages, tabs, and windows, interacting with other applications on the same machine, and even (shocking, I know) stepping away from the keyboard from time to time.

Sometimes those interactions will be within the session window (a fairly arbitrary window, to be clear) and count as one visit with a long duration. Sometimes those interactions will be across session windows and count as multiple visits of short duration. Neither’s really entirely accurate, but in the aggregate it seems to me the latter is probably more accurate.

WPBook 2.1 Released

John — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 13:51:24 +0000

Just tagged release for 2.1.

Upgrading: be sure to read the release notes from 2.1b1, which outline steps you will need to take after upgrading from 2.0.x to 2.1. (If you previously used 2.1b1 or 2.1b2 you should already have done these steps).

See:

2.1 also incorporates a fix for Facebook’s recent shift to _POST rather than _GET, which flz discusses at the end of this thread.

WPBook 2.1 Beta 2 – Post as Notes, Custom Themes

John — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 19:49:16 +0000

Note to self, by S@Z, creative commons license

Just tagged a 2.1 beta 2 release of WPBook, which adds to the earlier release 2.1 beta 1 some new tricks:

Post as Note in Facebook. Based on a patch supplied by sebaxtian in the forums, this option changes the posting type in Facebook from a regular story (an entry in your news feed) to a Note, using the Facebook Notes application.
Custom Themes. Based on a patch from BandonRandon, this functionality looks first for an installed theme named ‘WPBook’ and if it finds that uses that theme over the default supplied theme. This way, advanced users can change the appearance of their WPBook powered blogs inside Facebook and not have those changes overwritten with each new release. I will be sure to note in future releases when any new functions are introduced or significant changes made to the theme files.

I haven’t, unfortunately, gotten much feedback on the beta. I say unfortunately because I think that’s a result of few people testing it – I suppose it’s possible it is just working for everyone but I think it has seen few downloads. (There’s one reported error in the forums, but I can’t isolate what’s causing it).

So please do test this one – remember that if you are upgrading from 2.0.x you will need to make the same changes to your settings as described in the release blog post for 2.1 beta 1 .

Report on your success or failure in the forums – thanks.

WPBook 2.1 Beta – Open Graph API, OAuth

John — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 19:51:00 +0000

I’ve just tagged earlier today a 2.1b1 (beta 1) release of WPBook. Please download it and test it, and report back what you find here or (preferably) in the forums.

Make changes to your Facebook Application settings described below after installing WPBook 2.1 but before trying to visit application pages!. We’ll update the official WPBook documentation once we’ve got a few folks testing the new version and can move to a 2.1 release.

This release is the first to use Facebook’s OAuth-based authentication protocol, Graph API, and new PHP SDK. I know that’s a whole lot of acronyms, but let’s just say it means we’ll stay current as Facebook makes obsolete some of the older ways of integrating to Facebook.

New features:

Facebook Like button on posts, rather than Share button. The like button now works in a very similar fashion to the older share button (it posts into the users news feed when he/she likes something). It also resolves to the external url, so if you’re using a Facebook Like button on your blog outside Facebook, likes inside Facebook will get counted as well.
iFrame based tabs. Unlike the old FBML based tags, iFrame based tabs (which you can use on “new” page profiles) can include videos and other full html objects.
WPBook now uses post_thumbnails (“featured image” set in the post edit screen) for wall posts, which should yield more consistent results
WPBook now requires WordPress 2.9 or later

In other words, this is really mostly a back-end cleanup release.

When you install, you’ll need to make a number of changes:

In WPBook Settings, there’s now a box for “App ID” rather than “API-key.” You’ll need to change this as if you had WPBook before 2.1, it will be set to your API Key – you’ll need to change it to your App ID
In WPBook Settings, go into the Stream/Wall section, make sure your Profile ID and Page ID are set correctly, and click on the Check Permissions link. Even if you previously had permissions set correctly, you’ll need to re-grant them in order to store successfully an access token that will give WPBook the ability to connect to Facebook even when you are offline. The Check Permissions page itself (shown inside Facebook, see below) now tries to give an indication of the current status of all permissions and necessary steps.
Update your Facebook Application settings – go to your Facebook application and change the Advanced Tab settings to match the below – enabling OAuth 2.0 and Post for iFrames Canvas urls
Update your Facebook Application settings for Page Tabs. If the page you want to add the tab to is using the old page style, leave tabs set to FBML and ?app_tab=true&fb_force_mode=fbml (as before). But if the page to which you want to add the tab is using the new profile layout, change tabs to iframe, and change the tab url to ?app_tab=true, leaving out the &fb_force_mode=fbml bit.

Here’s what the new “Check Permissions” page looks like:

And here’s what the “Advanced” tab of your Facebook Application settings should look like for 2.1 or later:

I’ve validated that it is working for me on two different WordPress blogs (with different Facebook Applications):

Posting to individual profile Wall on post publish, including featured image
Posting to Application Profile Wall, Page Wall, and Group Wall, including featured image. (One type of wall at a time – is there interest in posting to multiples at once?)
Importing comments from individual profiles and from page walls – based on wp-cron, running hourly
Showing canvas pages with new OAuth based permissions
Showing iFrame based tabs or FBML based tabs, depending on the string entered in the url box of the Facebook settings for Tabs – iFrame based tabs only work on new style profiles

WPBook 2.0.13 Released

John — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 16:29:12 +0000

Just checked in and tagged version 2.0.13 of WPBook. Thanks to BandonRandon for her patches!

A few quick updates in this release, but fairly minor:

Moved and Unhid the infinite_session_key in admin WPBook setting screen. Lots of folks were confused by where that option was located.
Fixed attribution line function which prevented %author% from working
Added global gravatar setting – otherwise we only filter gravatars inside facebook. (This prevents wpbook from interfering with othee gravatars in themes outside fb).
Added DONOTCACHEPAGE constant when pages are viewed inside facebook –
this should enable WPBook to better coordinate with wp-super-cache, though you will still need to use the “Use PHP to serve cached files” rather than “Use mod_rewrite to serve cache files” for this to work.

In addition, I started to experiment a bit with Facebook’s new iFrame based “tabs” for adding to profile pages. (They still call them tabs even though the new Profile Page layout doesn’t have tabs proper anymore). Unfortunately the auto-resize function which sizes the iframe to the right height for its content seems to be broken, or deprecated, or otherwise non-functional.

What does this mean for WPBook users? For now, it means keep using the FBML tabs model to add your page tabs. I will keep working on getting the iFrame-based tabs working, which will enable better support for videos and such on the profile page.

Your settings for your Facebook application, in the “Facebook Integration” section, should look more or less like this:

This means having the “Canvas Page Type” set to iFrame, with auto-resize, but leaving the “Page Tab Type” set to FBML, and using the ?app_tab=true&fb_force_mode=fbml as the tab url.

If you’d like to experiment with iFrame-based tabs, you can try the setting, using just index.php as the url but I think for now you will be unhappy with the results.

The real, long-term solution to page tabs will have to come in 2.1 along with the transition to OAuth-based authentication, the Graph-based API, and the latest Facebook SDK – not sure yet when that will be.

WPBook 2.0.11

John — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 00:05:46 +0000

Ours Goes to 11

Just tagged and checked in another maintenance release of WPBook, 2.0.11. This will be the last (hopefully) release in the 2.0 series – next up is 2.1, with OAuth 2.0 for authentication. (Facebook is migrating in this direction, which means eliminating by March 2011 some of the calls I’m relying on now).

This release also incorporates all the 2.0.10 changes, but it marked stable – so many of you will jump right from 2.0.9.2 to 2.0.11.

Changes in 2.0.11:

Removed “add to profile” tab options. (Facebook no longer allows these for individual profiles, only for Facebook Pages, and the button itself is not necessary).
README updates – link to instructions
Conditional checking for fb_page_target to avoid ‘premature end of FQL query”
README updates on profile tabs
Add pending_to_publish state. (This should pick up posts written by other authors but now approved by an editor).
Filter JS out of FB share link
Added more debugging info

Changes which were in 2.0.10 (and thus incorporated into 2.0.11):

(Changes by bandonrandon, see http://bandonrandon.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/wpbook-2-0-10-beta-release/)
Move includes into their own directory
Incorporate FB avatar in comments imported
New Admin Layout, images
Bug fix: default for ‘post to facebook’ is set to true
Links in permissions page point to wpbook.net
FB tabs view moved to its own file in theme directory

I’ve also updated a few of the directions pages on WPBook.net to reflect more accurately what WPBook can do and what settings are necessary – that work will be ongoing this week to bring the directions up to speed with both Facebook changes and WPBook changes.

In the meanwhile, post in the forums in you’re having difficulty.

Facebook Commerce 1.0? JC Penney’s Usablenet App

John — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 16:42:45 +0000

Last week I participated in two roundtable discussions at the PluggedIn Ventures Summit on Ecommerce.(There were lots of interesting tweets during the summit – search for the #pisummit hashtag). When the issue of Facebook for commerce (or F-Commerce) came up on the Social Commerce panel, I pointed to JC Penney’s new Facebook app store as an example of what’s wrong with F-Commerce. In this post I’ll expand a bit more on why I think that’s the case, and what that means to retailers looking to understand how Facebook fits broadly into their multi-channel strategy.

During the initial roundtable of the day, the discussion turned to Facebook, and its role as the new portal:

#pisummit – Facebook is the new AOL?Dec 21 via Twitter for BlackBerry®Darius Razgaitis
mrdarius

While I can understand the impulse to draw parallels between the role AOL held for many (especially media) companies in the early days of the (commercial) internet, I think we’ve got to be careful to not miss the lesson the portals never properly learned: on the web, everything else is always one click (or one tab, or one window) away.

#pisummit People spend time in FB, but they also have 10 other tabs and windows open – portal isn’t the window through which I view the webDec 21 via TweetDeckJohn Eckman
jeckman

In other words, Facebook may be the new portal, but does the concept of a portal even make sense in a world of multi-tabbed browsers, multi-tasking users, and multi-device access? If there ever was a world in which a portal could truly be the user’s starting point and the window through which that user viewed everything on the web (already a questionable claim), that day has long passed. Many web users spend significant amounts of time “on” or “in” Facebook, true, but what else are they doing at the same time?

The question becomes more than just academic when you come at it as a large scale retailer trying to create a strategy for Facebook.

JC Penney’s store, which launched just before the holiday season, is a Facebook Application (powered by Usablenet) which enables the whole shopping experience without leaving the social network. As Consumerist put it:

JCPenney just snagged the “anchor store” spot on Facebook, becoming the first retailer to let shoppers purchase crap directly from their Facebook page application through a fully integrated e-commerce platform.

FastCompany was a bit more polite (not sure Penney’s PR likes the term “crap”):

Today J.C. Penney became the first major retailer to make its entire catalog available to shoppers within Facebook—not just to peruse, but to buy.

Starting now, you can purchase any of the 250,000 items that the department store sells online from its Facebook page. The company expects many sales will take place as a result of shoppers seeing items listed in their friends’ news feeds and then clicking through to the product pages, still within Facebook.

The application itself is really quite simple. It relies on approach familiar to most of us from Usablenet’s mobile versions of websites: minimizing / transforming the existing site (server-side) and providing the transformed content to the new context – in this case, presenting a transformed version of JC Penney’s ecommerce site in an iFrame inside Facebook. (So long as you are in a browser session in which you’ve already authorized the app, you can actually load it outside a Facebook context by opening a new tab and visiting https://m.usablenet.com/ma/jcpenney.com/index.html?auth=yes).

Landing Page of the new JCPenney Facebook Store application

When the user clicks on of the categories on the left, the app loads (via JQuery) new content representing the subcategories, on down to specific shelf page and then a product detail page, as you can see in this brief video:

The major problem with this approach is that the application never changes the top-most frame’s URL as the user navigates. Start on the landing page, drill down to Men, then to suits and sportcoats, then to a specific coat. Now, back up to the shelf page. D’oh! If you’re like me, your habit is to hit the back button in the browser (or even the keyboard shortcut for it), but if you do that here, you’re SOL. (If you’ve opened the store in a new tab or window, you may find your back button disabled, depending on your browser – but if the tab or window you are in has a history, back will take you to the last url you visited before entering the store).

The problem is that the app isn’t changing the original url you were on once you entered the store, so no new entries are created in your browser history. This was a problem with frames the first time around, and remains one with this approach. (Aside: in WPBook we handle this by targetting all links to top and creating fully formed apps.facebook.com/app/path style URLs).

Usability issues aside (and yes, there is breadcrumb / back navigation just below the top navigation – but it is easy to miss), my bigger issue with the application is just how non-integrated with Facebook it is. JC Penney doesn’t seem to be taking any advantage of the fact that I’m already logged in to Facebook and have granted the application all kinds of privileges in the process.

When you first load the application, you’ll get this permission screen:

Permissions Request for Shop JCPenney Application

So you’ve granted the app permission to access your name, photo, gender, and “any other information I’ve shared with everyone” – which for most folks is a lot of other information. But then if I go to the “store locator” within the app, it doesn’t offer to use my location from my profile (or ask for the extended permission user_location, which an application can specifically request):

Store Finder inside Facebook - doesn't leverage user_location

So maybe there isn’t much leverage in the store locator inside Facebook – or perhaps it might be better at that point to request the location from the browser rather than from Facebook. But the same lack of integration more glaringly comes up when you go to check out. For example, say I found an LCD TV I wanted to purchase. (The broken image icon in the screenshot occurs randomly throughout the app – seems to be something amiss with the translation into Facebook App in some cases):

Department page for House -> Electronics -> TV and Video

Clicking in to a TV, and adding it to my bag, I then proceeded to click on checkout, and get this screen:

Checkout Process - No Prefilling with FB info?

Granted, the email address I used when registering at JC Penney’s may or may not match the one I used as primary at Facebook, so it is a good idea to not assume they are the same, but why not request my email from Facebook and prefill it for me, so that I don’t have to start from scratch? More to the point, why do I need to register at all? You can check out without registering, and the only difference seems to be associating an email address and password with the account. But given that I’m logged into Facebook and granted the application permission to access my info, why not just allow me to then use my Facebook identity to later access my account? Why do I need yet-another-password at all?

Assuming I didn’t already have an account at JC Penney’s, and clicked Register, I get this (after an initial screen for email and password):

Billing Address page for Checkout

The only thing defaulted here is the USA, which I think is not because I’m in the USA but because it is the only allowed option. On to payment then, let’s use a credit card:

Credit Card Info

To me this feels very much like ecommerce circa 1999 – multistep checkout with a broken back button, no useful defaults (couldn’t we at least assume the name on the card might be usefully prefilled with the name I gave two screens ago? Editable, sure, but blank?), and changing look and feel – note that the buttons on the credit card screen are suddenly blue where they’ve been (somewhat) consistently red or grey.

E-commerce on FB? Currently e-tail experience is circa 1999. @jeckman #pisummit #gothammediaDec 21 via webAndy Harrison
cloutmobile

My larger point, though, isn’t just to critique the usability of the application. First to market doesn’t always mean best-to-market, and I’m sure the usablenet solution (which simply translates the existing store, requiring no significant platform effort on the retailer’s part) offers a compelling time-to-market advantage.

My point is that we need to question the very purpose of Facebook stores: Why is it supposed to be useful to me as a consumer to browse the entire catalog and make a purchase inside Facebook?

I get that retailers want to be where the audience is – and I’m a big proponent of distributing your digital footprint throughout the web. But what such stores fail to do is customize the experience to its context. What the user wants to do in Facebook is not the same as what the user wants to do on JCPenney.com, and (equally important) what the technology enables is different.

What retailers need to do in looking at Facebook as an opportunity is innovate: create opportunities for user experiences that take advantage of the Facebook ecosystem, both in terms of technology and user expectations. Just as mobile application developers have come to understand that what makes sense on a phone or a tablet isn’t exactly the same set of functionality that makes sense on a web application designed for desktop browser use, F-commerce developers and designers need to prioritize and understand that subset (or maybe it is a superset, entirely new) of functionality that makes sense in context.

We need, in other words, applications actually designed for use in Facebook, not more retailers putting their whole store in an iframe-based application just because they can. I think this is why virtual goods based applications have so far proven much more successful than real-world goods in Facebook: they’re native to the platform, and designed directly for it, not “adapted” to it.

Social as a Layer: Sears’ Social Commerce Experience

John — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 12:43:59 +0000

Email Invite from Sears.com

When I got the above email from Sears inviting me into a new social shopping experience, I hoped that they’d found a way to combine MySears and Sears.com together more contextually and pervasively, letting me move easily between the “get advice before you buy” approach of MySears.com (with its action verbs being join, explore, and connect) and the shopping focused Sears.com.

They haven’t, but what they have done is introduce more social functionality into the shop. Visit sears.com and in the utility navigation right underneath the multi-brand bar (Sears, Kmart, Crafstman, Kenmore, Lands End, etc) you should see an option which toggles between “visit our social site” and “leave our social site.” Clicking on “visit our social site” and you’re greated with this splash screen explaining the new experience:

Sears' New Social Experience

It seems Sears has added a bit of social networking functionality as an overlay to the shopping experience, letting you “message” and “follow” other users, seeing their (on site) social activity. You can view profiles, see who other users are following and followed by, get badges, join groups, and do many of the other activities we’ve come to expect in the era of Facebook and Twitter.

The Bearded One - a Sears Associate and one of the public profiles on Sears.com Social Experience

What’s more unusual is the relationship this new social site has to the existing store and community. MySears.com continues to exist on it’s own tab, suggesting a separation between the researching activities (“get advice before you buy”) and the shopping activity of Sears.com. But the new social site is essentially a kind of layer over the regular shop.

Social Site Version of Product Detail Page

Non-Social version of Product Detail Page

Look at these two cropped product detail pages. Both are of the same product in the Sears.com product catalog – a Blu-Ray DVD player. One image is from within the social site (note the toggle says “leave our social site”) and the other is from outside the social site (“visit our social site” being the link). The language suggests that the social site is a separate place (one you visit and leave) but the experience suggests that social is more like a layer you turn on and off – like the virtual reality overlay in an iphone application which adds review information to your camera view of the street on which you’re walking.

The “non-social” view is:	The “social” view is:
- Product summary, including ratings and photos, and links to other Sony products	- Product summary, with options to like it, dislike it, own it, want it, and share it, as well as activity from your network (all, like, want, or own) for this item
- Product description	- Product description
	- Wiki Product description
- Frequently bought together	- Frequently brought together
- People who viewed this item also viewed	- People who viewed this item also viewed
- Specifications	- Q & A
- Community Discussions	- Community Discussions
- Sears Can Help	- Sears Can Help
	- Social (repeat of the activity for this item: all/like/want/own)
- Customer Ratings and Reviews	- Customer Ratings and Reviews
- People who bought this item also bought	- People who bought this item also bought

In other words, there’s only a few rows of difference, mixing some social activity (Q&A) in place of specifications, adding a product wiki, and repeating the social network information (people in your network who like/want/own the item being viewed) again later in the page.

Unfortunately there’s a lot of empty social areas at this point – not many items that lots of people in the network have liked/disliked/wanted/owned. It also seems like asking a lot to require users to now find new folks to follow, rather than importing and matching their social graph from Facebook, Twitter, or an email address book search. You can invite people via email, but I didn’t see any easy way to build a new network.

My Network is not very robust - nor I suspect will most user's be at first

What do you think of what Sears is trying here?

I love the idea of activity streams (and the standard for syndication of them) in the context of shopping (see Swipely, Blippy, and Shwowp), but I’m not sure how Sears will get enough critical mass built up if users have to specifically choose to follow each other, and their activity is only visible inside Sears’ own walled garden.

Like Automattic, they’ve essentially avoided the Facebook “like” button in favor of their own – but will users go to the trouble of liking a product in multiple places, or will Sears just end up with a quiet network where the only active users are associates?

WPBook – Posting to more page types, new site

John — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 23:01:02 +0000

(photo by hobvias sudoneighm, click for photo page)

Thanks to troubleshooting help from mommyknows and other users, I’ve been able to track down and fix an issue with posting to different kinds of pages.

Thanks to Brooke Dukes, we also now have a site for the plugin itself: wpbook.net – with instructions, blog posts about the plugin, and the like.

Grab 2.0.8.1 from the plugin repository and check it out!

(2.0.8 somehow incorporated a nasty syntax error – whitespace ahead of the opening PHP tag – so skip that and go straight to 2.0.8.1).

For a long time now WPBook has enabled users to cross-post excerpts from their blog posts to either the wall of their personal profile or the wall of a Facebook fan page.

However, in setting up WPBook many users were ending up with:

Your WordPress blog outside Facebook. (Example: www.openparenthesis.org
The Facebook application view of your blog. (Example: apps.facebook.com/openparenthesis)
The Application Profile page for your new Facebook application.(Example: https://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=12797741823)
A Facebook Fan Page for the Blog, or other Fan Page on which the blog gets published. (Example: https://www.facebook.com/pages/WPBook/44062579871, which in this case isn’t a fan page specific to the blog but to the WPBook plugin itself).
Facebook Tabs, which can be added to users’ personal profiles (including your own), or Facebook pages (either a Fan page or an Application Profile page). (Example: https://www.facebook.com/pages/WPBook/44062579871?v=app_12797741823).

Starting with 2.0.8.1, WPBook can instead post directly to the wall of the Application Profile page – which is a nice way of showing potential application users what kind of blog posts come through the application.

Of course, you can post to your own profile’s wall in addition to a second target, which can be any of these:

A Fan Page wall
Your Application’s Profile page
The Wall of a Facebook group

If you post to a Fan Page wall or an Application Profile wall, the post will come from the Application; if you post to the wall of a Facebook group, the post will come from your personal profile.

Settings for Profile ID and Page ID

You should provide your personal Facebook Profile ID in the WPBook settings, and then in the field provided for “PageID,” you can provide:

An actual Page ID, for a Fan Page. (To find this, click on “edit page” – the url will look something like this: https://www.facebook.com/pages/edit/?id=44062579871 – the Page ID is the part after id=)
An application ID, for an Application Profile page. (To find your application ID, go to the Application profile page, the url of which will look something like this: https://www.facebook.com/developers/apps.php?app_id=12797741823 – the Application ID is the part following app_id=)
A group ID, for the wall of a Facebook group. (To find your group ID, just visit your group page, the url of which will look something like this: https://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=149948248362737 – the Group ID is the part following gid=)

As always, please post in the support forums with your experiences.

Facebook Changes, WPBook

John — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 22:18:59 +0000

Interesting post today on the Facebook developer blog regarding the roadmap. The post noted that, among other things:

We are also moving toward IFrames instead of FBML for both canvas applications and Page tabs. As a part of this process, we will be standardizing on a small set of core FBML tags that will work with both applications on Facebook and external Web pages via our JavaScript SDK, effectively eliminating the technical difference between developing an application on and off Facebook.com.

We will begin supporting IFrames for Page tabs in the next few months. Developers building canvas applications should start using IFrames immediately. By the end of this year, we will no longer allow new FBML applications to be created, so all new canvas applications and Page tabs will have to be based on IFrames and our JavaScript SDK. We will, however, continue to support existing implementations of the older authentication mechanism as well as FBML on Page tabs and applications.

Finally, due to low usage rates, we will remove application tabs from user profiles in the next couple months. Application tabs will continue to be supported on Facebook Pages.

Good thing I finally got around to updating WPBook to support FBML-based tabs, just in time for them to be discontinued. ;)

Oh well, once they allow iFrames on tabs we’ll get the ability to do things like embedded videos. But then they’ll take tabs away from individual profiles? So individual profiles won’t have boxes or tabs?

I guess that will just encourage anyone really using WordPress as a platform for promoting their blog will end up creating a page, and then using the tab in the page?

You can see a timeline of some of the updates here: Developer Roadmap

They also changed the developer app again:

We’ve also spent some time cleaning up some of our developer tools and documentation. We’ve simplified the Developer application by removing obsolete settings and tabs

So the instructions for WPBook which I just updated last weekend will need updating again to match the new settings look & feel. Ah the joys of depending on a third party platform . . .

Once more with Feeling: WPBook 2.0.3

John — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 14:01:20 +0000

That’s what I get for trying to make too many changes in one release. Sheesh.

WPBook 2.0.2, released last night, is already superseded by 2.0.3, which I just tagged for release.

Bugs fixed:

Extra whitespace in wpbook.php after the closing ?> tag
Cleaned up includes to break on functions rather than midstream

I think that will solve the most immediate issue folks are having.

As always, let me know what you’re seeing here or in the support forums.

WPBook 2.0.2: Tabs, Stream Publishing, Comment Imports

John — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:06:09 +0000

Lots of changes in WPBook 2.0.2, which I’ve just finished tagging for release, but the most important are:

Import of comments posted on Facebook Wall. (If you’re following non-stable, beta releases, you’ve had this since 2.0.0 – but it is improved and stable enough now for all to use)
Ability to suppress posting excerpts to Facebook on a post-by-post basis
Fix for bug with posting excerpts to Facebook Wall (of individual profile or fan page)
Revised instructions to match current Facebook and WPBook settings pages, in four steps
Reordered and simplified settings page, putting most used settings nearer the top (and matching new instructions step by step)
Tabs: for individual profiles and application profiles, you can now add a view of your blog as a tab – and much html is supported. (Sorry, no objects or iframes, thus no embedded videos).
Debug setting which writes a file with attempts to import comments
Ability to edit the attribution WPBook uses when posting to Facebook Walls
PHP 5 calls moved to conditional imports – should improve error reporting for folks trying to use WPBook on PHP4 hosts, when it requires PHP5

As always you can get the latest WPBook from the WordPress.org repository and let me know in the support forums how it’s working for you.

Here’s a quick screenshot of what this blog looks like in a tab (without this post, obviously):

Open Parenthesis blog as a Tab (Click for full size)

WPBook 2.0.1, beta testers still needed

John — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 20:46:30 +0000

Once again, I’ve tagged a new version of WPBook for release. See the “other versions” section of the download page.

I’ve revamped the way permissions are requested, so as to store the session key Facebook provides when the user grants “offline access” permission. This enables WPBook to import comments from either the user’s Facebook Wall or the Wall of a Facebook Fan Page.

I’ve also added the ability to change the attribution line (the little blurb WPBook attaches to each message when you post it).

Given the complexity of all the different ways one might configure the application, though, I feel a need to get some folks testing it before making it the ‘default’ new release.

If you’re testing it, please do let me know – either via comments here, in the wpbook support forum, or via the contact form.

NOTE: This version has debugging on by default, which means it will create a debug text file in your wpbook plugin directory – this can be disabled by editing wpbook_cron.php at line 37, changing:

define ('DEBUG', true);

define ('DEBUG', false);

But there is useful info in that debug file for trying things out.

You’ll also probably find, in testing, that you’ll need a plugin like Core Control which lets you see what cron jobs are running and run specific jobs ahead of schedule.

Thanks

John

Warning: Don’t Run Lifestream and WPBook at the same time

John — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 20:49:06 +0000

Quick warning: don’t run WPBook with the latest version (0.99.9.8-BETA) of the Lifestream plugin. Bad things will happen.

An updated version of the prohibition on burning the candle at both ends

Here’s why it’s important to test plugin updates.

After my last post about beta testers for WPBook, I decided to go update my other plugins which had updates available, including Lifestream, which had an update to 0.99.9.8-BETA from 0.99.6 available.

So I jumped in without really doing any investigating of what changes there were – bad idea.

Here’s what I got for my mistakes:

Lifestream Gone Wild

Somewhere between whatever version I was running (I believe it was 0.99.6) and this current 0.99.9.8-BETA, the Lifestream developers changed the way they track new events, and started to “publish” every Lifestream event as a post, using custom post types as defined by WordPress 3.0. Unfortunately this wasn’t stated very clearly in the documentation.

I’ve deactivated the plugin and deleted all the extraneous wall posts Lifestream created – hopefully not too many got passed into my friends streams.

I’ll have to look at how WPBook can better handle “custom post types” and perhaps create a setting whereby folks using custom post types can decide which post types WPBook should and should not cross post to Facebook.

Beta Testers Needed for WPBook

John — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 19:08:14 +0000

Test Boxes, photo by David Bleasdale, cc-by license

I’ve just tagged version 2.0.0 of WPBook for release, but haven’t yet changed the “stable” tag in the readme.

What that means is that if you’re using WPBook, you won’t seen any automated notification of a newer version being available. You’ll have to go to the WPBook download page and find 2.0.0 at the top of the “other versions” list.

Please do so, especially if you are willing to help test the new features.

What is there to test? Most importantly, a new feature which imports comments made by users on your Facebook wall (or the wall of a Facebook page) in response to excerpts posted by WPBook on those pages.

In other words, if you have “publish to Facebook Stream” enabled and working for your personal wall and/or the wall of a Fan Page, when you publish a new blog post, and that post gets published to the FB wall, and users make comments on that wall post, those same comments will get imported to your WordPress hosted blog.

A few notes:

You’ve got to have stream publishing working in order for importing to work. For the last few versions, I’ve had the app request “stream_read” permissions as well as “stream_publish” – so it should have the right permissions. If it doesn’t, visit the “click here to grant permissions” page from the WPBook settings and try regranting them – it can’t hurt and it might help.
Comment importing relies on wp_cron, WordPress’s built in pseudo-cron system, which basically lets timed events happen in the background. (It’s the same thing that makes scheduled posts work). In order to get WPBook’s necessary hooks added to wp_cron, you will need to deactivate and then reactivate the plugin.
In case you weren’t listening above, you will need to deactivate and then reactivate the plugin for commenting importing to work. Comment importing is a task which fires off hourly, so don’t expect any comments for the first hour or two.
Comment importing will only work for new posts, or more accurately, posts published to your Facebook wall AFTER installing 2.x. Posts you had previously posted to your Facebook wall will not have their comments imported.
Comment importing also only works for posts published within the last 7 days (user configurable). Basically this is a potentially taxing operation, and it’s my experience that most comments on a Facebook wall are made within the first 24 or 48 hours of a post being made, so there isn’t much point in going back longer than 7 days.
You can configure (in the expected places in WPBook settings) whether comments imported from Facebook should be automatically approved, and what email address should be affiliated with them. (This is different than comments made inside the Facebook Application version of your blog, where users can input their email adress. The comment form for wall posts doesn’t allow for email, and doesn’t grant the application permission to pull the users email). This is so that you can set a gravatar to be used for imported posts (just set the email address to one you control, then set a gravatar for that email address).
There is a debug mode, enabled by changing define ('DEBUG', false); to define ('DEBUG', true); at line 37 of wpbook_cron.php. (If you’re not comfortable changing this, perhaps you shouldn’t beta test plugins.) This will create a wpbook_debug.txt file inside the plugin’s directory which captures information about every time cron runs.

Additionally, this version also includes the often requested “Promote External links” option – if checked, this will cause WPBook to use your external (WordPress) permalinks for new posts, both in the “Recent Posts” box in your profile and also in the Wall notifications, so users are sent to your WordPress blog, not to the Facebook Application view of your blog. In essence this lets you use WPBook without ever expecting users to go to your Facebook Application, which is now just used as a mechanism for connecting WordPress to Facebook for the publishing of new posts and the importing of comments.

If you are testing it, please let me know by commenting here or posting in the support forums for WPBook and thanks in advance!

Sunday Coding – ReTweeter, WPBook

John — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 18:05:09 +0000

Two quick Sunday updates.

First, ReTweeter has been updated to 0.9.4. The fix here was primarily to deal with tweets which, when retweeted with the username prepended, were longer than 140 characters.

Second, WPBook has been updated to 1.5.3. This includes a new option to enable publishing to the wall of a Fan Page independent of publishing to the author’s personal wall. (1.5, 1.5.1, and 1.5.2 all could publish to Fan Page walls, but also published to the author’s wall, which in many cases results in duplication for many of your friends and fans.)

Also in 1.5.3 is some improved error checking (fixed the “activation on PHP 4 hosts” bug and added more Try/Catch pairs around Facebook client calls) and the ability to support old school permalink urls with query string parameters.

Good to be home on the weekend . . .

WPBook 1.5.2 released

John — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 03:48:25 +0000

I’ve just tagged and released version 1.5.2 of WPBook, which should be available for download by the time you read this.

In this version:

Plugin now checks for PHP 5 at activation, will not allow activation under PHP4
Checks for zero pages of which user is admin (avoid edge case exception)
Added link to installation instructions to permissions page
Added offline-access permission request (some users had not yet granted this permission)

Added “show errors” mode, which when enabled traps exceptions thrown by the Facebook client and shows them to the user

Not really a required upgrade, but it should help folks having trouble, and won’t cause trouble for others.

I will also now close comments on the existing 1.5 release blog post, as it is now out of date.

In general, I’d prefer not to use comments for troubleshooting anyway – please use the support forums for those kinds of items instead.

Thanks

WPBook 1.5 Released – Let the Streaming begin!

John — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:03:34 +0000

WPBook

So for a while I’ve been working on and beta testing the next version of WPBook. Tonight I’ve just tagged it for release, so it will be available for download shortly. (I’ve already been running it here for a while and testing it on a few other test blogs).

The main improvement in WPBook 1.5 is that it now knows how to use stream.publish, meaning that it will automatically post to your wall in Facebook when you publish a post in WordPress. Your friends should see that notification as well in their streams. (We’re not, however, sending application updates or tracking all users’ user id’s – instead you enter your own userid into the settings and it uses that to post to your wall). Included are attachments (first image attached to the post is used) and excerpts (if you hand craft excerpts they will be used in the wall post).

The other main improvement is that WPBook now requires PHP5, and as such can wrap Facebook calls in Try/Catch blocks. For the non-programmer, this means those awful, dramatic “fatal uncaught exception” error screens are gone. WPBook isn’t doing anything terribly meaningful with those errors yet – still working on that- but at least it traps them.

In this release:

WPBook now requires PHP 5
Enables user to post to stream, including to pages. (Must be pages for which you are the admin, to which you have added the app, and which have granted stream.publish permission – link provided in the admin to grant permissions.
Catches exceptions thrown by the Facebook client. (Doesn’t yet surface those in good error messages, but at least they are caught)
Fixed, I hope, issue with comments inside Facebook for some users
Clean up of some admin styles (resized gravatar images as well as some basic hierarchy on options)
Added Page Options as their own section
Allow user to select pages to be excluded
Added option to allow a menu of parent pages at top of the app below the title
Fixed “Facebok” typo in line line 182 of theme/index.php
Option to turn on and off page list under content (independent of menu)
Option to turn on/off recent post under content
Allow user to set the amount of recent post to show under content (default 10)
Cleaned up custom header/footer now only one function instead of two (no reason to have two functions)
Added %tag_links% and %category_links% to custom header footer as well as made archive pages work.
Set smart default for when Blog Title isn’t set

Next steps?

Better error handling code – do something with the messages Facebook returns when an exception is thrown
User selectable theme directory – for users who’ve taken the time to customize their theme
Threaded comments – likely means requiring WP 2.7, though for error handling (and just simplicity) I’m thinking of jumping right to WordPress 2.8
Cross-Posting to a commenter’s wall when they comment inside Facebook. (Because it is in response to a user action, I understand they don’t even have to grant stream.publish permission).

What else would you like to see?

Update: Closing comments on this post. For troubleshooting please use the support forums instead.

WPBook 1.4 Released

John — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:21:39 +0000

(Update 1/14 – now 1.4.2. Fixes detailed in readme – Admin side javascript issue, issue with submitting comments for folks who install wordpress files in a subdirectory different than their root URL)

(Updated 1/5 – it’s actually 1.4.1 now, as there was a typo in the theme/index.php file – get_exteral_url should be get_external_url).

Last night I packaged and released version 1.4 of WPBook, the plugin I maintain which creates a view of your WordPress blog as a Facebook application.

(For example, see Open Parenthesis as a blog, and then Open Parenthesis as a Facebook app).

Highlights of this release

Fixed bug which made invite friends link only work on the home page
Fixed bug in setting for custom/header footer which included a permalink
(WordPress support topic 306263)
Added Gravatar support
Added (experimentally) a list of “pages” as well – this means you should able to use WPBook even if you have a static homepage set in WordPress – just use the url of your home page as the “Canvas Callback URL”
Removed hard coded references to wp-content and plugins directories
(See http://willnorris.com/2009/05/wordpress-plugin-pet-peeve-hardcoding-wp-content)
Removed hard coded reference to config.php, routing Facebook comment submission through WordPress’ built in query parser instead
(See http://willnorris.com/2009/06/wordpress-plugin-pet-peeve-2-direct-calls-to-plugin-files)

As you can see, this was really more of a bug-fix and code cleanup release, with one experimental functional addition (pages). The one feature I didn’t get to but wanted to was threaded comment support (as in WordPress 2.7 and later). Would users want to be able to set threading differently inside Facebook than outside it? (I’m thinking that WPBook should just follow the settings in the blog it is installed to, with respect to threading – and perhaps gravatars as well, given how integrated with WordPress gravatars have become).

The next version will be more of a “feature set” release, and will also be the first version to require PHP 5. Although Facebook only officially supports a PHP 5 client library, I’ve been supporting PHP 4 by relying on an open source PHP 4 Facebook client.

The problem is that many of the operations most requested by users rely on Facebook API calls which sometimes fail. The PHP 5 client handles this by throwing exceptions, which WPBook needs to catch – something PHP 4 can’t do.

What’s coming in 1.5

Here’s my tentative roadmap:

Threaded Comments – which may mean upping the minimum WordPress to 2.7 for simplicity’s sake. Given that we’re at 2.9 now I think that’s ok.
More work on Pages. Need to be able to list pages not to show inside Facebook, enable user to set page depth, maybe even show the top level pages as Facebook style tabs across the top of the application? (tricky inside an iFrame app)
PHP 5 required – this will allow me to trap “uncaught exceptions” which sometimes occur when users submit new blog posts. It’s a cosmetic error but a really ugly one which it happens, and as I use more and more Facebook calls it may happen more often.
Publish to Facebook’s Stream.publish API when a new blog post is published – this is the most commonly requested feature. (Is it fair to assume the blog author is also the owner of the Facebook application? I had assumed so but that may not be the case – may require the user to enter his/her Facebook UID in WPBook for publishing to the stream)
Enable publishing to the wall of a Facebook “page” as well as a userwhen a new blog post is published.
Enable users leaving comments to also publish to the Facebook stream- has to be at the user’s discretion, but WPBook could offer to publish comments both to the stream of the user publishing the comment and to the blog author’s stream.

What else would you like to see in WPBook 1.5? (Not that these aren’t enough).

I’ve also got to start thinking about WordPress 3.0 and the merge with the WPMU codebase, and what impact that has, but I’m hoping that can wait for WPBook 1.6.

WordCamp NYC, WPBook, WordCamp Boston

John — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 18:41:18 +0000

Here’s the slides from my presentation this morning at WordCamp NYC. It was in the “beginning developer” track so I tried to focus on the overall structure of how the plugin does what it does and the hooks/actions/filters used.

Hard to fit the talk into 30 minutes with time for questions and roadmap – there’s so much more I want WPBook to do – hopefully I can find the time soon.

You Got Your WordPress in my Facebook: Developing WPBook

View more presentations from John Eckman.

I also took the opportunity, naturally, to promote WordCamp Boston, coming January 23rd. See you there?

Looking forward to watching sessions the rest of today and volunteering this afternoon / tomorrow. If you’re here, stop me and say hello.

WordCamp NYC, WordCamp Boston

John — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:21:20 +0000

I’m very happy to note I will be attending, volunteering at, and speaking at WordCamp NYC, coming up in November 14th and 15th.

My talk is one of the Saturday Sessions in the Beginning Developer track. (Hopefully not a rating of my development skills as evidenced by the plugin’s code, but reflecting the intended audience).

Here’s a quick blurb:

You Got Your WordPress in My Facebook!: Developing WPBook. WPBook is a plugin that enables users to turn their self-hosted WordPress blog into a Facebook application. Full web posts are viewable within the Facebook context, including embedded multimedia. Users can comment using their Facebook identity, and comments (and comment threads) are shared between Facebook users and regular blog readers. WPBook uses a deceptively simple set of actions and filters, along with the Facebook API, to create a relatively high degree of integration. In this talk I’ll go over the basics of how WPBook works, the current challenges in terms of meeting user requests, and some of the solutions currently in development.

WordCamp NYC looks to be an amazing production: good location, large crowd, and a solid group of speakers, including a Sunday keynote from Matt Mullenweg himself. Tickets are still available but I would not be at all surprised to see this sell out, so register now.

I’m also leading the organization for the first-ever WordCamp Boston, on January 23rd, 2010. We’ll be hosted at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development center, which is a fantastic venue right in Kendall Square.

Tickets aren’t on sale yet, but there is an announcements google group if you want to be notified when they do go on sale, and an organizers google group if you want to help put the event together. There’s also a design contest for the logo (enter by November 11th please!). I expect to open a call for speakers shortly.

Given all the interest I’ve seen and heard around Boston from end-users, SEO and affiliate marketing folks, developers, and businesses small and large in WordPress as a platform (including .com and .org), I suspect WordCamp Boston will sell out as well – so sign up for the announcements list if you think you’d like to attend.