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);
to
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

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.

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!

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

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

I tweeted the other day what I think is a better way of completing that sentence, and I’m reposting it here in hopes someone finds it interesting and starts to spread it:

If Facebook were a country, the citizens would have revolted and demand a better terms of service already!

Alright, I didn’t tweet it quite that way, but I like that wording better and it still fits in 140 characters.

How would you finish the sentence?

If Facebook were a country . . . .

Or maybe, what other memes should we start based on the same structure:

If Twitter were a country . . .

If LinkedIn were a country . . .

The goal of the presentation- a sanitized (client references removed) version of one given to a client this week – was to talk about:

• Social Media (and specifically how to get started with it)
• Facebook (and other social network applications)
• The iPhone (and other mobile platforms)

It certainly loses a bit in not having the voice over – sorry I couldn’t record it but much of the discussion was really client specific and less useful outside their context – if I get time maybe I’ll do a walk through and record a voiceover.

I tried to place the requested agenda items in the context of what we’ve been calling “The Assembled Web” for the past couple of years, connecting the specific social computing initiatives in a broader framework, one which involves:

1. The convergence of content, commerce, and community – as they grow out of the previous web eras
2. The notion of the Digital Footprint – taking your brand presence (across all three Cs) to where users are, and engaging them throughout the Internet

I hope you find it useful – please do comment here or on SlideShare.

Photo by Uncle Bartelby

Adina Levin wrote earlier this month (Twitter, Facebook, and the unselfish API about the differences between Twitter and Facebook not in terms of how they treat their users but in terms of how they treat external developers.

In short:

Twitter’s API is unselfish. Using the straightforward REST API, developers can and do write clients, search tools, mapping tools, recommendation tools, analytics, personal organizing – a wide range of extensions. Twitter doesn’t do anything to constrain developers other than a rate limit.

Whereas:

Facebook’s API is build to serve Facebook more than developers.

She goes on to discuss the shift towards Facebook Connect, away from the emphasis on the application platform, but notes that even then:

The problem is that when sites use Facebook Connect, they have minimal connection to their user base. An an application or community site wants to create the policies whereby the site communicates to the community, and the community talks to each other. With Facebook Connect, those rules belong to FaceBook. . . . With FB Connect, all your member database are belong to them.

One could argue, of course, that it isn’t a fair comparison. Twitter’s platform is more narrow than Facebook’s, with a much simpler privacy model (protected or not, versus groups, networks, friends, and per-application settings), and much less potential for exposure (photos, videos, and detailed personal info being in Facebook’s direct control versus external services like TwitPic). Facebook would argue, I imagine, that they’re trying to create a high standard for privacy for their users, rather than allow every third party app to set it’s own rules, and that this requires them to maintain more control.

Still, I can’t help but feel that the “Open API” approach – impose as few controls as necessary – is ultimately more web-native and will succeed, while the “Controlled API” approach – only release the functionality absolutely necessary and control use with strict Terms of Service (ever read the FB Connect terms?) – calls to mind the old days of walled gardens like Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL, before they joined the real web.

Photo by suburbanslice

It’s a perfect example of what I’m seeing as a growing trend, in which various “social widgets” actually replace functionality which should be built into the platform hosting the site. Bundling together the ability to use your Facebook identity with the actual management of comments themselves looks like progress but I think it’s really a step backwards.

Announced on the Facebook developer blog, the Comments Box widget is embedded into your site through javascript, and basically enables Facebook-driven commenting.

Facebook users can leave comments using their Facebook identities, and when they do will also have the option to publish those comments back to their Facebook profiles. (This is already possible using the Facebook Connect APIs, but the comment box certainly simplifies the process).

Facebook Comments Box

What happens in the process, though, is that all your comments on your blog are no longer really on your blog. Those comments are actually submitted to Facebook, who stores them for you and shows them on demand when your pages containing the comment box load.

In WordPress terms, this means you’re not able to use Akismet, or Mollom, or OpenID, or ReCaptcha, or any of the other plugins you might be using on your site to manage comments. (You also won’t be able to use the WordPress iPhone app to moderate comments, since they aren’t submitted as comments to WordPress).

It also means that someday, when you decide to migrate away from the Facebook Comments Box, there’s no simple way to get all the comments out (and it isn’t clear whether the terms of service would allow you to do so even if it were simple).

The announcement is careful to note that:

The Comments Box allows non-Facebook users to make comments on your site as well.

But that feels a bit like “we’ll still allow you to use cash, even after we install the credit card machine” – it’s giving me back something I already had as though it were a bonus. It’s as though we’re at the point where “non-Facebook users” are, like “those with JavaScript disabled,” a community we magnanimously allow to continue to use the web but don’t really design for.

Like Yahoo Updates with JS-Kit, TypePad Connect, DISQUS, and IntenseDebate (though the last of these offers a comment import/export feature), this is yet another “all ur comments are belong to us” move, in which I think the hosting site loses more than it gains.

Or am I just a crusty old first-generation blogger thinking that I need to store away comments in a database I control, and I should really be more open to having my comments streams “in the cloud”?

See also:

• Facebook Launches Commenting Widget
• Facebook Connect Adds Cut-and-Paste Comments Widget
• Facebook Comment Widget: Quick Review
• Facebook invades your blog, rest of Web with new Comment Box

Now, 15 months later, there is a network for Optaros – but I can’t join it. (I also have no idea what finally triggered creation of the network – enough people requesting it? Enough people listing Optaros as their employer? I only discovered its existence because it showed up in a search result).

To join a network, one visits the account settings page, network tab, and uses the handy “add network” form, which you can see below:

Facebook add network form, as seen in the case of a work network

I fill in my work email address and submit, and the list of networks I belong to updates to this:

Facebook network awaiting confirmation - click for full size

Yeah! That looks like progress. Get the email, click on the confirmation link, and the network status page says this:

You might think you're done at this point - click for full size

You might think, at this point, that you’re done. Wrong. Go anywhere else in Facebook and then come back to this “networks” list, and guess what you see?

Facebook network awaiting confirmation - click for full size

I tried three times before I gave up.

One could go ask this question in the Facebook help section, but there’s an awful lot of questions and no real answers there.

So now I have a work network, but so far only 1 out of the ~175 eligible Optaros employees has been able to join it.

Wasn’t Groundhog Day in February?

I’ve just checked the code for version 1.3 of the WPBook plugin into subversion, which means it should shortly be available for auto-update in your dashboard/plugins page, or for download here. (Remember that your dashboard/plugins page only checks once each 24 hours for new plugins, so you may not see it until tomorrow).

Changes in this release:

1. Improved Admin UI – options sorted into categories, with help text
2. More options: ability to include date with post title, option for custom header/footer including custom date/time formats, tags, categories, and author names
3. Style cleanup on the “view post on original blog” link (now matches the share this post link)
4. Bug Fix: No more duplicate blog name on the top of the “Invite Friends” page
5. Bug Fix: When profile boxes are updated as a result of a new blog post, the permalinks were pointing to the blog outside Facebook, rather than the Facebook urls

I also cleaned up the installation instructions (included in the plugin as an html page and PDF document) to reflect the new options screen and some facebook side changes.

NOTE: This will be the last version of WPBook that will support PHP4.

The Facebook client is only officially available in PHP5, and I need to add some exception handling for cases where the Facebook client fails to update the users profile FBML. (Right now that case, when it occurs, throws a very dramatic if harmless “Uncaught Exception” error in the WordPress interface).

If someone wants to create an alternative version of WPBook for PHP4, they can do so using this release as the place from which to branch, but when WPBook 1.4 comes out, I will no longer include PHP4 support.

Apologies to those of you who rely on PHP4, but it’s time to find a host that can enable PHP5.

Special thanks in this release to Brandon Dukes, who wrote most of the updated code in it. Sorry it took me a week to get it tested, packaged, and released.

Here’s a screenshot showing some of the new customization options:

Options available within WPBook for customizing the user's experience

Here’s the “advanced” options screen:

Advanced Options screen - click for full size

Next version, 1.4, I hope will include the ability to post notices into the Facebook status feed and/or news feed when you publish a blog post and (potentially) when comments are published. Not sure what the timeline on that will be, however.

Just checked in changes for WPBook version 1.2 – get it from the WordPress Plugin Directory or on this blog.

The biggest change here from 1.1.1 (and why I decided to make it 1.2 rather than 1.1.2) is a change to the mechanism used to create the user profile boxes. Although it worked for some users, the previous method (relying on an fb:ref url pointing to the recent_posts.php page inside the WPBook theme) was at best inconsistent, and could even cause uncaught exceptions.

The new mechanism, which sets the profile FBML in a function and uses an fb:ref handle to refresh it, seems to be more generically robust and should improve things, especially for anyone who had the “No content to display” error when trying to add the profile box to the profile.

Also in this release are some administration page improvements (thanks Brandon) and timestamp on posts.

As always, comment below if you have issues, and if you get your blog setup using the plug please leave a comment on this page.

Tagged and released version 1.1 of WPBook earlier today – get it from the wordpress plugin directory or this blog.

New in 1.1 (more info in the README with the plugin):

• Option to show “view post on www.blogurl.com” links associated with each post – shows the blog post in its original context
• Option to move the “share” link and “view original” link to the top or bottom of posts
• Option to show/hide the “add to profile” button

(Thanks to Brandon for all of the new settings).

Also I believe I’ve got the profile.setFBML working – meaning users no longer have to copy default FBML anywhere. At least it works in my two test blogs – let me know if it works for you.

I’ve also included better (I think) documentation, including screenshots of Facebook admin screens, to try to demonstrate the process of setting up an application.

If you’re using WPBook, please visit this page and add your blog in the comments.

Remaining open issues:

• Sociable.es Facebook Connect plugin conflicts. You’ll have to update the facebook client provided with the Connect plugin as described here
• Custom home pages – if your WordPress blog has a homepage that is not the default list of recent posts, I don’t know if this version will work for you – sorry, it is on my list to address but the theme currently assumes a default home page setup
• Javascript/CSS plugin conflicts – if your other plugins use css or javascript to set the height of the body or html elements to 100%, this will interfere with Facebook’s own iframe sizing javascript.

Enjoy!

Two quick announcements this week which bode well for OpenID:

1. PayPal joins the OpenID Foundation
2. Facebook joins the OpenID Foundation

It’s fantastic to see the largest and fastest growing social network (in the US anyway) and a major online payment provider both joining the momentum behind the open stack and the assembled web.

See also:

• PayPal Joins OpenID Foundation
• 5 Reasons Why Facebook + OpenID is Good News
• Facebook joins OpenID Foundation: So What?
• Facebook | OpenID group

UPDATE (1-26-09): As noted in the comments below, there is a bug in the copy of the Facebook library included with the Sociable Facebook Connect plugin. If you’re using that plugin, you’ll need to patch their copy of the Facebook client library as follows.

Change line 170 of /wp-content/plugins/fbconnect/facebook-client/facebook.php from:

http_header('Location', $url);

To:

header('Location', $url);

This will eliminate the conflict between these two plugins.
(End UPDATE)

Today I’m releasing version 1.0 of WPBook, the WordPress plugin for embedding your blog in Facebook.

If you have earlier versions installed, you should see an auto-update notification on the plugins page of your WordPress dashboard. (Note that WordPress checks for updates only every 12 hours).

This version includes the following new features:

• Added option for “Share this Post” – user determines whether or not to show “Share” links on posts
• Added option for user to enable or disable comments from Facebook – does not affect comments left on the blog directly
• Moved the “Invite Friends” (also an option) to the top of the application next to the “Add to Profile” link – these two options should be high visibiility to encourage use
• Added option for “Give Credit” which shows a “This Facebook Application powered by the WPBook plugin for WordPress” byline at the bottom of the Facebook canvas pages.

Here’s what the new admin looks like:

WPBook Options Page (Click for Full Size)

It also includes the following bugfixes:

• Added simplexml44 library (BSD Licensed) for the php4client, eliminating the need for user to locate and install
• Cleaned up CSS for “recent posts” in main page – list items were not enclosed in a <ul> tag
• Added fix to facebookapi_php5_restlib.php which affected hosts where curl libraries were not present or enabled

As well as, of course, the existing features from earlier releases (see 0.9.7 and 0.9.3 for more on these):

• Canvas page showing recent blog posts in a Facebook iFrame, meaning blog posts can contain video, flash, javascript, etc – not that Facebook does impose some restrictions.
• Profile Boxes listing 5 most recent blog posts which can be added to user profiles and pages
• Share this Post links, enabling default Facebook “send a message or post to profile” functionality for individual blog posts
• Invite Friends option to enable users to invite their Facebook friends to install the app

Get WPBook 1.0 on this blog or at WordPress.org.

UPDATE: Comments closed here. Check this page for most recent launch announcement and comment on the most recent version.

A few changes since 0.9.3, the last version I blogged about (the most recent version can always be found on this page or at the WordPress site):

Share Button. This version adds a Facebook style “Share this post” button next to each blog post in Facebook, which allows the user to send the posts to Facebook friends or post and individual blog entry to their profile.

Here’s what the share button looks like, in context:

Share Button for Post inside Facebook

And here’s the resulting popup, with the “post to profile” tab active:

The resulting Popup with 'Post to Profile' active

Ease of installation and Update. Earlier versions required the user to add a directory to their /wp-content/themes/ directory. In this version, and moving forward, the plugin carries the theme directory inside it. Among other things, this means that the “update automatically” function from inside the WordPress plugins page will now work with no additional effort on the user’s part.

Add to pages. The directions have been clarified with respect to profile page boxes. If you want users to be able to add your Facebook Application to Pages as well as user profiles, you will need to enter some FBML (provided by the plugin, on the settings page) in Facebook.

Facebook Settings for Pages, with Default FBML (Note: FBML here is for this blog - yours will be different)

No Conflict with other Facebook Plugins. Using multiple Facebook plugins on your WordPress blog can lead to problems, as each includes its own copy of the Facebook client libraries. This version now checks for the existence of other libraries and relies on those already present if they have been declared.

Plans for 1.0:

For the impending 1.0 release, here’s what I plan to do:

1. Make the “share” button a setting, enabling users to turn off the functionality if they choose.
2. Provide a link to the “original” version of each blog post (outside Facebook) – also optional
3. Add a small “powered by WPBook” type link to the bottom of the canvas page – with option for user to disable.

I also plan to update the page for the plugin here and at WordPress with some screenshots to accompany the documentation, but that might not happen until after the plugin is released.

Updated for 0.9.2. (Jan 7 2009)
Updated for 0.9.1 (Jan 2 2009)

I’ve been working on an update to WPBook, the WordPress to Facebook plugin I co-developed.

I haven’t yet released this version on the WordPress plugin site, but I do think it’s stable enough for use – try it out and let me know what you think.

I’m using it here: http://apps.facebook.com/openparenthesis/.

This version allows an “add to profile” button inside the app, which presents the five most recent posts in a profile box – can be on the user’s main profile or inside the “boxes” tab.

It also enables – if the “application settings” inside Facebook are set – for the blog app to be added to FaceBook “pages.”

Download: WPBook 0.9.3

What remains to be done is testing – especially testing with multiple user accounts when you publish new blog posts – does the new blog post show up in other people’s “recent posts” profile box?

I’m also working on cleaning up some of the admin UI – right now there’s a complicated set of steps one has to go through in order to get an “infinite session key” which basically lets WordPress update the list of recent posts whenever they change, regardless of whether any specific user is logged in to Facebook – I think I ought to be able to make that a “get infinite session key” button, which handles the whole thing in a jQuery modal popup or some such.

Anyway, try it out and see what you think – hopefully I can finalize a release shortly.

(Note: There’s an excellent tutorial here on how-to forge which greatly helped in getting this working – worth a look, though it is for a different kind of application).

Update: Looks like Facebook has deprecated infinite session keys, but they key Fbml.refreshRefURl method I need no longer requires a session key. Trying this path now. Yeah – it works.

If you’re not familiar with Coulton, two quick gems. First, Code Monkey:

Second, his great cover of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Baby Got Back:

In the interview (transcript here if you prefer reading to listening – I’m quoting from the transcript), Coulton talks about his use of social media to create direct relationships with his audience, and why some approaches have been more effective than others:

Facebook and Myspace are essentially duplications of my blog and my email which I already have a blog and email so you know, I don’t, I sort of don’t understand why bands use something like Myspace unless the answer is they can’t, they don’t know how to make their own website

Guess it helped that Coulton was originally a software developer. More to the point, Coulton identifies the risk of closed social networks and cloud platforms:

I was always suspicious of Myspace because for the very simple reason that you don’t have direct access to your network, you only have it through Myspace. If Myspace ever goes away your network winks out of existence, you don’t have your emails you don’t have any way of getting in touch with them. You are completely dependent on Myspace.

And you know you look at what happened with Friendster you know, guess what social networks rise and fall pretty quickly. That what happened with Friendster and it’s sort of what’s happening with Myspace I guess and no matter how great and eternal you think a social network platform is it’s an illusion it’s going to go away. And so to spend all your time building up this Myspace network is I think has the potential to turn out not so well.

Well put. I also really liked his point about creative commons licensing, which he leveraged very effectively early in his (recent) career and continues to use:

. . . you know it was kind of a scary thing but I really just rationalised the thing, well let’s just get the attention now and worry about making the money later, and you know, if the worst thing that happens is a million people get one of my songs for free, like you know, that’s okay, that something I can build on. And I would rather have that happen than make $15 from my friends who buy it and nobody else can hear it, you know.

The interview also touches on Eventful, rickrolling, Wil Wheaton, Ze Frank, podcasting in general, YouTube, and (of course) Twitter.

Well worth a listen, especially but not exclusively if you’re and independent musician or wanna-be independent musician.

As I tweeted at the time, the timing could not have been worse, as I was already feeling bad about not having been as productive a blogger as I’d like to be over the last month or two (I’ll spare you the obligatory “blogging is important to me but I’ve been really busy and I feel bad about it and I promise to be better” post), so hearing that blogging was at best futile (since spammers and professional authors have taken over the blogosphere) or, worse, was a marker of just how “out of it” I am.

Boutin writes:

The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

Or, in his later psuedo twitter speak:

@WiredReader: Kill yr blog. 2004 over. Google won’t find you. Too much cruft from HuffPo, NYT. Commenters are tards. C u on Facebook?

So I was overjoyed this morning to find Doc Searls coming to the defense of blogging, and not just to refute the argument that it is out of fashion but more importantly to reassert its centrality.

Doc’s argument has three key bits, all of which resonated with me, the last most of all:

First, Doc points out that the goal should not be to simply chase the latest buzz – the goal for most authentic bloggers is not just to turn up high in search results, but to say something meaningful. Doc writes:

First, why give a damn about buzz? Here are the main things it’s good for: 1) popularity, by itself; 2) driving eyeballs past advertising. Nothing wrong with either, as long as substance is involved. Even if all you want is ad bux, it helps to remember that there isn’t a 1:1 ratio between traffic and click-throughs. Quality still matters, and buzz isn’t its only driver.

Second, Doc points out that blogging provides a mechanism that is not equaled by twitter (or other microblog applications), Flickr, YouTube, or Facebook. All are wonderful services and well used by most bloggers, including Doc (and me):

As personal journals on the Web go, blogs have no substitute. Twitter is fine for 140-character micro-postings, and for the ecosystem surrounding it. But micro-posts are not journals. Flickr is great for posting, tagging, organizing and annotating photographs, and for allied services such as creating groups and the rest of it, but it ain’t blogging. Facebook has some blogging features, but at the cost of forcing the blogger to operate in a vast hive of non-journalistic activity — and flat-out noise.

Third, and most importantly, the blogosphere is a fundamentally open ecosystem, whereas many of the cloud based services are less so. While Flickr and Twitter are reasonably friendly to openness, and allow you to expose content via various APIs, blogs are at their heart about sharing discussion openly:

To the credit of Flickr and Twitter, they are mostly friendly to the open Web, and not roach motels tricked out as friendly walled gardens. No ‘fence, but that’s what Facebook looks like to me. (Argue that if you like, but you still have to admit that it’s a private space rather than a public one.)

Meanwhile, blogging is free-as-in-freedom at its core. It’s something you do as an independent human being.

Although most blogs run on hosted services, those blogs are still ours. Do it right, and the constraints are minimal. http://doc.searls.com is a WordPress blog on a Harvard server, but if I want to move it elsewhere, I can do that. I have data portability, and service substitutability.

Freedom matters. Independence matters. Not being utterly dependent on any single service provider not only matters, but is an essential virtue too rarely visited and too lightly respected. What Richard Stallman said about clouds (that they’re “a marketing hype campaign” and “You’re putty in the hands of whoever developed that software”) has more than the ring of truth to it. His is a warning as righteous as those made by responsible forecasters of the financial meltdown.

Blogging at its best is free speech working in open spaces. That virtue persists, no matter how many slums get built in blogging’s hosted services, and no matter how passé it seems at the moment.

Can I get an amen!? Data portability and service substitutability – that’s the core of what made the web and it will continue to be.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’ll be participating in two panels. The first is “Stump the Consultant,” in which a series of consultants (including me) get asked the same question and their answers are rated. (An iPod and noise canceling headphones create an isolation booth while the others answer so that we can’t hear each other’s answers). Should be good fun. Wonder if I’ll get any SharePoint questions.

The second is on “Facebook in the Enterprise,” which is a panel moderated by my former colleague Jarrod Gingras, now at CMS Watch:

Key topics will include security, enterprise IT concerns, “viral” effects, custom applications, privacy, networking, and information sharing.

Fellow panelists include Toby Ward (CEO of Prescient Digital and author of the Intranet Blog) and Kyle Arteaga (VP of Communications at Serena, which relies heavily on Facebook as its intranet). You can read Toby’s take on Serena’s Facebook Intranet here.

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.

I’ve spent some time over the past few nights revising the wp-book plugin, which lets you bring your WordPress (self-hosted) blog into Facebook as an application, and I’ve published a new 0.7 version.

You still have to add the Facebook developer application, accept their terms of service, and get an API key to be able to deploy your blog-inside-facebok, but the plugin no longer requires creation of an extra page nor editing of your existing themes.

Instead, inspired by Alex King’s excellent “wordpress mobile” plugin, wpbook now asks you to install an additional theme, wp-facebook, into your theme directory, and then uses that theme when it senses it has been called from inside facebook.

This means you not only get a few recent posts, but in theory all your posts, available inside Facebok. Once I know this release is stable, I should be able to start rolling out additional features like archive links for years, months, categories, etc.

As before, you can see it action with this blog’s content on facebook: Open Parenthesis.

You can download it from here, it should also get populated into the WordPress plugin directory soon.

Made some progress on wp-book over the weekend; should be able to release an update this week. (I will post updated code on this site as well as upload to the wp-plugins directory). (If you don’t know what I’m talking about see this earlier blog post).

Still sometimes see an error in Internet Explorer at this point – seems to be a timing error with respect to the “resize to content” for the iFrame. I thought about moving the Facebook application back into FBML (Facebook markup language), but then I would lose the ability to have objects, embeds, and other things inside the iFrame.

If you’re reading this somewhere other than Facebook, and you are a Facebook user, please go check out http://apps.facebook.com/openparenthesis/ and leave a comment.

If you’re reading this *in facebook* please also leave a comment, and tell me what operating system / browser / version you’re using.

When you submit your comment, you will be redirected back to the application landing page – sometimes people get errors there as well, though in essence it is the same url on which they started.

I really wanted, though, for users to be able to comment on blog posts from inside Facebook, with their Facebook identities, and have it work like the OpenID comment plugin (in the sense that the user should not need to provide any authentication info, but it should be derived from their Facebook login).

I think I’ve finally got it it nailed, at least to the point where folks can start testing it.

If you are a Facebook user, go to this application page: http://apps.facebook.com/openparenthesis/

It will require you to log in (or already be logged in) to Facebook, but you don’t have to add the application to your profile or spam all your friends.

What you’ll see is my five most recent blog posts from this blog, inside a Facebook wrapper. (Can’t include embedded videos, the styles are bit wonked, etc – but it is a start. This is basically just Dave Lester’s plugin).

You should also (this is the new part I’ve hacked in) see the ability to comment on posts – without being asked for a name or url or email address.

Please leave me a comment to test it out. It should, if all works according to plan, pull your Facebook profile pic as your avatar for the comment as well – since your facebook profile page is actually an hCard with appropriate markup (go microformats!).

I believe this will work even for folks who are not “friends” of mine in facebook – but let me know if you run into difficulty.

Once I’ve validated that it works I’ll publish the code. It required me to add at least one file to my theme, and relies on the hAvatar plugin to get the profile pic.

Known Issues:

Sometimes the “autoresize iFrame to content size” bit in Facebook fails, and you end up with a fixed size view into longer content, with no scrollbars. Haven’t figured out what triggers that yet – standard facebook javascript api.

Sometimes you’ll get the “You’re entering comments too fast” error – just wait 30 seconds. Unless lots of people are all trying to do it from facebook at once this should go away. I’ll need to figure out how to unthrottle the comment queue in wordpress for this point.