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!

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 . . .

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

(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.

You can find that plugin here: Twitter Tools StatusNet (and should be able to find it soon on wordpress.org).

What I hadn’t realized at the time was just how Twitter Tools itself worked, and what that meant about the StatusNet plugin.

Twitter Tools follows all of your tweets, not just those which you enter via WordPress or generate as new blog post notifications. What this means is that using Twitter Tools in combination with the StatusNet plugin, everything you post on Twitter gets also posted to the StatusNet instance you’ve configured.

Everything you post on Twitter, regardless of it’s source: desktop client, SMS, web client, etc.

This means you’ve got to be careful. If you use Identi.ca, for example, and have your Identi.ca account configured to cross post to Twitter (which is a popular option) you’ll create a loop. You post to Identi.ca, which cross posts to Twitter, where Twitter Tools finds it and (with my plugin in place) cross posts to Identi.ca, which cross posts to Twitter, and so on (repeat until someone tells you your account has gone crazy).

So, you’ve got to decide which service (Twitter or StatusNet) you intend to actually post to, and which you want automatically fed cross posts.

• Post to Twitter, auto-cross-post to StatusNet. This is what I’ve decided to do. I post to twitter, through all the usual methods, and I let Twitter Tools cross post my tweets to Identi.ca. I have different friends/followers on each, and this way the conversation gets shared.
• Post to StatusNet, auto-cross-post to Twitter. This you can do with existing StatusNet instances, and if you do, be sure NOT to install the StatusNet plugin for Twitter Tools.

Hope some of you find the option useful.

Now that Twitter Tools is at 2.x, Alex has provided an API for enabling additional posting.

So I wrote a plugin for his plugin: Twitter Tools – StatusNet.

It leverages the API he provided to post your tweets (on new blog post creation or via the sidebar form) to a StatusNet instance (default is Identi.ca but it can be easily changed to another). (In case you missed the announcement, the software formerly known as Laconica, which powers Identi.ca but also other sites, is now known as StatusNet).

Given that many StatusNet instances also already cross-post to Twitter, my plugin enables you to suppress the actual posting to Twitter that Twitter Tools does. (You can have notices posted to both Twitter and your StatusNet instance, or just your StatusNet instance without Twitter).

What it doesn’t do is provide all the functionality Twitter Tools provides – digests of your notices, a sidebar widget containing latest notices. If you cross-post to twitter you can use all that functionality from Twitter Tools natively.

If you’d like to replace Twitter throughout Twitter Tools with your favorite StatusNet instance, you can hack away at Alex’s plugin directly – the same basic concepts I outlined before would still apply.

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.

As described in this earlier post, I’ve modified Twitter Tools to use Identi.ca endpoints rather than Twitter ones, since I have my Identi.ca account set to auto-cross-post to Twitter.

Here’s a revised version of what I’m calling Identi.ca tools – just replace the twitter-tools.php from the 1.6 release with this one (rename it from twitter-tools.php.txt to twitter-tools.php of course) and you should be good to go:

twitter-tools.php.txt

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.

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.

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.

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.

TripIt has launched profiles for travelers, with some pretty good controls on what is public and what is private:

The immediate goal is to give TripIt travelers one place to track all their travel information and showcase their travel history. The profile includes basic information about a traveler, including home location, upcoming trip destinations, connections in TripIt as well as important travel statistics like miles traveled, days on the road, etc.

It’s got a nice, RESTful public url – mine’s at http://www.tripit.com/people/jeckman

I’ve updated my TripIt Action Stream plugin – the good news is that it will now provide a real profile link rather than just linking to the TripIt homepage.

You will, however, have to make your activity feed available to everyone – but if you didn’t want to do that, you probably don’t want to publish your activity feed as an action stream anyway. (Actually you could leave your activity stream private and still publish your profile link – just uncheck the activity feed checkbox when adding the profile inside MT).

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.

It’s basically a roll-your-own lifestream, though for now at least it isn’t integrated to anyone else’s streams, as in Friendfeed or Socialthing.

This morning I posted a new plugin which picks up TripIt Activity Streams.

TripIt’s activity stream is a private Atom feed which posts an item whenever you begin a trip, complete a trip, or start planning a trip. For example, here’s a recent entry from my feed:

You can download the plugin from the MTAS page.