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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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

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

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.

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.