Building Facebook Connect into WordPress
February 20th, 2009 by cbaxter.This afternoon I took a shot at building some elements of Facebook Connect into this site. Overall, it was a fairly painless process and I think the results are pretty cool. To borrow Facebook’s language, Connect lets you:
- Seamlessly “connect” their Facebook account and information with your site
- Connect and find their friends who also use your site
- Share information and actions on your site with their friends on Facebook
In easier language, it means that this site can now recognize visitors by their Facebook profile (if allowed) and (if wanted) can now distribute information back to their profiles. For example, if you comment here you can elect to publish comments back to your newsfeed in Facebook. You can also invite friends to this community, share content back with Facebook, etc. This particular blog is running on WordPress, so I used a plugin developed by Sociable! to get it up and running. Their documentation covers the main steps, but to highlight some points:
- Navigate to Facebook Developer and create a new application. Make note of the API and Secret keys (needed later), set the callback URL to your website (e.g. this site is www.christianbaxter.com) and change the logo pictures.
- Extract the plugin and load it to the plugin folder
- Activate, select options to enable and add the keys
- Add the Community widget to the sidebar
I’m pretty impressed with the results. On arrival, the community widget offers users the option to login via Facebook (or another method). If they login, it registers them to the community and ties into their Facebook account, with permission. From there, users can invite people to the community, easily share content back and enable the option to post comments back. I haven’t enabled the comment system because I’m still using Disqus to manage comments on this blog (love the email features). They have synced up with Connect as well, so it should be work through their systems for now (possibly needed another login though). We can expect Facebook to continue pushing the Connect platform with more capability and features. They have the value of the strongest (my opinion) social framework to offer websites and a set of applications that will be useful outside of the walled garden.
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thanks for the instructions
facebooks beats friendster in all aspects
facebooks beats friendster in all aspects