You asked for it, you got it. My FBFoundations WordPress plugin for Facebook Connect was built to provide you the basic building blocks to create your own Facebook Connect-compatible blog. The idea being you add the foundations, and then plugin developers can add their own compatible plugins on top of that with little to no additional effort. The first version was a little rough – it required you to have a popup login button the first 3 times a user visited your site (unless they logged in), wasn’t very compatible with 3rd-party comment systems like Disqus, and required some additional effort. It was a pain for me as well.
Today I’m releasing a new version, version 0.4, which has the following updates:
- The popup login is now optional, and off by default
- There is a new Facebook login button that appears in the sidebar if the user is not logged in. This is in addition to the one above the comments box.
- You no longer have to have a specific div with an id of “#commentform” to load the login button for your users
- Better support for jquery – since jquery’s built into the latest versions of WordPress, I now load that instead.
- Meta support! Now, any blog that implements the FBFoundations plugin will automatically have the correct meta tags to properly format Facebook shares back to Facebook. On each single post, the post’s title and excerpt are loaded correctly in the share to Facebook. If the post has an image, the first image of the post appears with the share as well, instead of forcing you to surf through an endless list of images. It just works.
In addition to the above features, you get the existing features which include:
- Pre-loading of Facebook Javascript client libraries
- XFBML support out of the box – you should now be able to include XFBML anywhere in your blog, in blog posts, etc.
- Automatic authentication and authorization of Facebook users
Now your job is to go create something. Once you install this on your blog you now have a virtual playground for which you can start using the Facebook APIs via Javascript or PHP. You can add some XFBML and do a friend invite form, for example, or maybe replace your comments with an fb:comments XFBML tag. Or maybe you want to get more advanced and start loading some friends via the API and friends.getAppUsers. I’m now going to go and have some fun with my FBShare plugin.
For more information, be sure to check out the official FB Foundations post (which I’m going to update with this post). The download with all the updates mentioned here is version 0.4. You can download it by clicking or copying this link.
Please let me know in the comments if you have any suggestions, bugs, or improvements. I also welcome any patches – this is 100% GPL’d code!
Here’s the link again: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/fbfoundations-facebook-connect-plugin.zip
