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.
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%
(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:
Read more…
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WPBook 2.0.2, released last night, is already superseded by 2.0.3, which I just tagged for release.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:
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.
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);
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
