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.