Home - Stay N Alive

Most guys (and girls) who love Facebook like I do probably have a Facebook Page where those wanting to get a scoop of the latest in our professional lives can come learn, chat, and converse with each other. I consider a Facebook Page (some call them “Fan Pages”) the equivalent on Facebook to a Twitter Profile, as it enables a public, anonymous way to express yourself without limit to the number of people that “follow” you. Pages are powerful, and can build strong engagement for you and your brand in ways Twitter or even a regular Facebook Profile can’t. I was surprised that with all the little “chicklets” out there displaying anywhere from the number of readers on your blog to the number of followers you have on Twitter that there wasn’t anything for blog owners to display the number of Fans they have on Facebook. That’s why I created the FBFoundations Facebook Chicklet for WordPress blogs.

The premise of the chicklet is simple. It uses Facebook Connect (something I argue is even more powerful than a Facebook Page, but requires someone with at least HTML and Javascript knowledge to implement) to go out and get the number of fans for a Facebook Page you specify, and share the number of those fans right on your blog. In addition, it hyperlinks the chicklet back to your Facebook Page. Displaying this chicklet on your blog can be a great way to encourage readers to click through and become fans on Facebook as well, where more conversations can take place and your blog can spread even further. You can see the Facebook Chicklet for this blog up above this article next to the subscribers and twitter followers chicklets. Go ahead and click on it and become a fan and I’ll send you more updates!

Implementation

To implement the chicklet, you’ll first need to download the FBFoundations plugin (download here) that I wrote and can be downloaded here. This just makes it so that it can access Facebook to get the number of Fans for your Page. It will also add an additional meta tag or two to make sharing your blog a little prettier when it’s shared on Facebook.

Once you’ve downloaded and activated FBFoundations on your blog, just download the FBFoundations Facebook Chicklet plugin, extract it into your WordPress plugins directory, and activate it. You’ll then want to configure it to point to your Facebook Page in your blog’s admin (if not, it will point to mine!). Now, go to either the sidebar widgets section in your administration if your blog is widgets-enabled, or go into your Blog’s theme files, and place the following code anywhere you want the chicklet to show up:

Once that’s in and the plugin is activated, the chicklet should start showing with the number of Fans on your Facebook Page. It’s that simple.

Again, be sure to enable the FBFoundations plugin on your blog for this to work. Also, if you want to also enable sharing for each blog post on your blog to Facebook, along with the number of people that have shared the post, be sure to also check out my FBShare plugin for WordPress!

I guess this is kind of my Christmas present to you all. Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and Happy Chanukah this season!

You can download the plugin straight from WordPress right here. Here is the WordPress plugin page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/fbfoundations-facebook-chicklet/

Image Courtesy Robb Sutton from http://robbsutton.com/micro-blogging-are-facebook-and-twitter-replacing-personal-blogs/

One of my biggest frustrations in adapting Facebook Connect into WordPress blogging has been the fact that most plugins out there either have too much, or too little incorporated into them. When you add more than one, you end up calling the Facebook Javascript Client libraries more than once, and often reinvent the wheel for what other people have done. I mentioned this in a wish-list I posted earlier. I want building blocks – I should be able to add a foundation, and add basic building blocks on top of that foundation to get what I want out of Facebook Connect on my blog.

Today I’m giving you that foundation. I’ve written a WordPress plugin called FBFoundations which sets up the bare-bones necessities of any Facebook Connect install. Once you have installed this plugin, the user can log in, and you have access to their login credentials from then forward to do whatever you want with. It’s a foundation – something to build a house on top of, and my hope is that many more FBFoundations-compatible plugins can emerge from this.

For instance, my next step will be to create a simple plugin for WordPress that uses the stream.publish API to post your blog to Facebook, and enable others to do so (tracking the number of comments and likes along the way if possible). There will be no need to add a user log in to that process, nor do I have to load the XFBML init scripts to render XFBML. It will all have already been loaded for me.

The script works a lot like Richard Miller’s “What Would Seth Godin Do” plugin from a UI perspective. At a default (you can configure this in your preferences) the first 3 times a user visits your blog they will be presented with a popup dialog box encouraging them to connect with Facebook. After those 3 times the popup no longer appears. There will also always be a “Connect with Facebook” login button above your comments (assuming they’re wrapped in a #commentform div) that will appear until the user clicks on it and logs in.

Using this plugin encourages each reader to log in through Facebook (remember – there are over 300 million Facebook users. Chances are most of your readers are on Facebook), and enables you to do cool stuff with each of those readers. Hopefully this will inspire others to make other FBFoundations-compatible plugins so we’re not re-inventing the wheel any more. Stay tuned for more plugins from me – what will you build with this as your foundation?

You can download the plugin here. Just download it and unzip it into your plugins directory in WordPress, activate it, and then add the API key for your website. (You’ll need to go to http://developers.facebook.com to add the developer app and add an app for your website if you haven’t done so already)

Or click here to download:

http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/fbfoundations-facebook-connect-plugin.zip

Please let me know in the comments if you see any issues. This is 100% GPL so please make your own adjustments and let me know if I can fix mine!

UPDATE – v0.4 – 10/26/2009: The popup is no longer default and can be turned on/off. Also added meta tag support and better compatibility with 3rd-party comment systems. See this blog post for more info on 0.4.

Here are some screenshots: