How to create an app for website integration: Javascript API - facebook

I'm a bit confused on how to implement the javascript api on my website. First, I need to create an app from facebook, but are there any settings that I should pay more attention to?
Ultimately, I Just want a like button - but I have elements on the page that will pay attention to the like stats, and would like to subscribe to the Edge.create etc methods.
I have an 'App for websites' created, but I'm running into a few issues: First, my like button doesn't show up at all unless the user is logged in. The second is that I just want it to say 'Greg likes biscuitcleaver.com' (much like it would read if the user liked a facebook page - but instead, when I click the like button it says 'Greg Likes a page on biscuitcleaver.com'
Ultimately, the link that ends up on Facebook should just redirect back to my url that I have registered with the Like button. (oh by the way, the url that's in the like button - does it have to be registered with my app somewhere # developers.facebook.com/apps)?
Thanks!
-Greg

You may have a look at the FB Javascript SDK and its login use case for examples and all the configuration details. Beware that FB has been known to change the behavoir of their SDK, so what's true about it today might not be by short notice.

Related

How to make the facebook share spider not to cache the page

I like the share button more than the like button, thats why i'm using it. The problem is that if the title of the page change and when someone paste it into facebook is still with the old title
Sample code
I put span with a tag in the bottom of the page
http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=http://stackoverflow.com
Using the share functionality is not a good decision since it has been deprecated and is no longer supported, as it clearly states here:
The Share button has been deprecated in favor of the Like button, and
will no longer be supported. Please use the Like button whenever
possible to drive maximum traffic to your apps.
And here:
What happened to the old Share button?
We deprecated the Share Button when we launched the Like button,
because the Like button improves clickthrough rates by allowing users
to connect with one click, and by allowing them to see which of their
friends have already connected.
With that said, to answer your question, it also written in the Like Button guide:
When does Facebook scrape my page?
Facebook needs to scrape your page to know how to display it around
the site.
Facebook scrapes your page every 24 hours to ensure the properties are
up to date. The page is also scraped when an admin for the Open Graph
page clicks the Like button and when the URL is entered into the
Facebook URL Linter. Facebook observes cache headers on your URLs - it
will look at "Expires" and "Cache-Control" in order of preference.
However, even if you specify a longer time, Facebook will scrape your
page every 24 hours.
The user agent of the scraper is: "facebookexternalhit/1.1
(+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)"
To clear the cache the easiest thing is to just use the Debug Tool.

Like button for Facebook page shows generic Facebook description in News Feed

I want a Like button on my web site that Likes my Facebook profile (rather than my web page), so that when a user clicks it they subscribe to my Facebook posts.
I've created the Like button using the tool at https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/
Further down that page there is an FAQ entry:
Can I link the Like button to my Facebook page?
Yes. Simply specify the URL of your Facebook page in the href
parameter of the button.
So, I've edited the href parameter to point to my Facebook page. eg:
https://www.facebook.com/myfacebookid
When a user clicks the Like button it has the desired effect. The user ends up having Liked my Facebook page. This is easily verified by the user going to my Facebook profile and checking that the Like button has changed to Liked.
But. When the user clicks the Like button, and entry appears in their News Feed with a generic Facebook description. ie:
Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and
others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to
keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, post links
and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.
I don't want a generic post about Facebook to appear. I want the description to relate to my Facebook account and/or web site.
Normally, I could modify this behavior with the Opengraph og: description tag, but as the page in the href is a Facebook page and not my own, I can't control the Opengraph tags.
I'm pretty sure that this was working okay before I enabled timeline for my account, so maybe this is a timeline bug?
So, how do I add a Like button which a) Likes my Facebook profile rather than one of my own web pages, and b) Posts a description of my Facebook profile rather than give a generic Facbook description?
Are all your fields in the info part of your page filled in, and/or completed? I just tested your theory and it seemed to work as expected, only thing is I know all fields in "info" are filled it. Give that a try.
This may happen if you have filled invalid/incomplete/wrong og tags in past and later changed them. Facebook's cache creates problem sometime.
Try putting all the entries (i.e. all og tags) and then debug them here http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug. This debugger gives a detailed info about the url with og tags and also clears the cache for you.
This should solve the problem.
You have 3 important fields that used on page opengraph: Name,Description,Profile Image.
They are used when some one post your link on Facebook, or Google or some else web service that handle opengraph.
Actually, the suggested answers currently do not work and there is an open bug / ticket on Facebook for it. Up to now, there's no fix.
The problem is that you can not use simply https://www.facebook.com/myfacebookid. You should copy and paste the exact page URL. If you have a low number of likes it would look something like https://www.facebook.com/pages/[YourPageName]/[Your page Id]/, and this is the URL that you should use at this point.
If it does not work, try also https://www.facebook.com/[YourPageName]/[Your page Id]/.
In short, copy-paste the URL, do not type it manually.

How to redirect the user to the log in page in a Facebook App

I am hosting a Facebook app on Google app engine, I need to make sure the user is logged into facebook before anything.
What I can currently do is display facebook's log in button using fbxml, but I prefer the user would be redirected to Facebook's log in page if he wasn't logged in, then back to my app's main page, this way I can make sure that the user is logged in before doing anything.
I am new to Facebook apps, I read here that I can redirect the user to
https://www.facebook.com/dialog/oauth?client_id=YOUR_APP_ID&redirect_uri=YOUR_URL
in order to authenticate him. But using GAE's self.redirect(url) doesn't work, the page stays the same. I was hoping I could do something like this in my handler:
if u'signed_request' in self.request.POST:
facebook.load_signed_request(self.request.get('signed_request'))
if not facebook.user_id:
self.redirect("https://www.facebook.com/dialog/oauth?"+
"client_id={0}&redirect_uri={1}"
.format(FACEBOOK_APP_ID, EXTERNAL_HREF))
return
but as i said earlier this doesn't work.
I'm assuming by 'Facebook App' you mean a Canvas App - so something that will live at https://apps.facebook.com/YOUR_NAMESPACE from a user perspective?
If so, you'll need to add the redirect via Javascript using window.top, as your app is loaded in an iframe. See https://developers.facebook.com/docs/appsonfacebook/tutorial/ and search for 'top', then view the example toward the end of the page.
There are also good examples on the Php Sdk that facebook provides. I like the with_js_sdk.php example. It runs seamlessly and is good to follow.
https://github.com/facebook/php-sdk
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/php/

How to migrate an Open Graph Page to a Business Page?

I have implemented the like button on a website. People have liked the website, and I have the option to administer that open graph object. However, on the administration page I see the following notice:
Administer Your Page
This is the administration interface for your
webpage at [...]. You can see Insights and
publish to the users that have liked your webpage. Only the
administrators of the webpage can view this interface, other users are
sent to the webpage.
This is a ghost page, because, as the notice says, only the administrator(s) can see it. I don't want the behavior of users being sent to my website. I want them to be able to stay on Facebook and see this page, just like they would see and interact with another business page.
Is there a tool or a request form to do this kind of migration (i.e. from an open graph page to a normal business page)?
I have researched for about two days for this issue, but I have not found any leads.
According to this help article, you can merge two facebook pages into one. But the constraint is that you can merge to a page with higher likes only, and the page with fewer likes will be removed. I am not sure if it works for ghost pages or not.
Shef, let me try to answer:
if you have an app myapp, that is canvas url https://apps.facebook.com/myapp
then you will have an application profile page: http://www.facebook.com/myapp [*]
So if a search your app from google or facebook, then they come to first this page,
and if they click go to app, they reach to your app.
However if you have just implemented like url: myapp.com/myitem=1
then you will have this "ghost" page. You need this ghost page, because you need somewhere
to administrate your likes
So you are asking a real page instead ghost, well this is hard to implement this request by facebook guys. Because there is like link to refer some url. So there must be some pop up asking user: 'Do you want to follow link or go to business page instead'
[*] username is not available anymore for facebook apps. see How to get name of facebook application page?
You can use the ref parameter while specifying your like button. This ref parameter will be set by Facebook, for all url's/links that appear on Facebook, i.e wherever this like action is displayed with the link to the url liked by the user. So you know when a user visits your page through Facebook. Check the following from this link:
ref - a label for tracking referrals; must be less than 50 characters and can contain alphanumeric characters and some punctuation (currently +/=-.:_). The ref attribute causes two parameters to be added to the referrer URL when a user clicks a link from a stream story about a Like action:
fb_ref - the ref parameter
fb_source - the stream type ('home', 'profile', 'search', 'other') in which the click occurred and the story type ('oneline' or 'multiline'), concatenated with an underscore.
Upon calling your url you can redirect the user to the page on Facebook that you want. Business pages on Facebook have a particular url, of course, and you can easily do the redirect.
I don't think that you have an option to migrate an open graph page to a normal business page. You can however create your page, and give it the same name as your website. The draw back here would be when users like your page on Facebook, you won't be able to accumulate the likes already garnered by your website.
EDIT
Take a look at the like box plugin (Facebook doc here ). It can be used to like pages that are on Facebook itself, from external websites. This way you will be able to accumulate your likes. You can also modify the plugin to look like a like button, not fully but almost. But you still end up creating a new page. And the old likes will not be available.

Event handling to detect if user clicks a 'Like' button in XFBML page

I have a Facebook connect app / canvas IFrame app which has a Like control for a fanpage.
I'd like to detect when the user clicks the Like button to be able to display additional info (a discount coupon code).
I'm using the latest Javascript API but the events that can be handled doesn't seem to include detection of social widget controls. The documentation for the Like Plugin doesn't show any events.
However I know its definitely possible because if I have two Like buttons on a page they both instantly update each other if I like or unlike whatever it is.
Edit: It is specifically allowed to require someone to become a fan for a promotion :
4.2 In the rules of the promotion, or otherwise, you will not condition
entry to the promotion upon taking any
action on Facebook, for example,
updating a status, posting on a
profile or Page, or uploading a photo.
You may, however, condition entry to
the promotion upon
becoming a fan of a
Page.
I think Facebook updated their documentation since I first looked :
Now its clearer :
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/javascript/FB.Event.subscribe
A 'like' click is the edge.create event
Official FAQ:
Q: How do I know when a user clicks a Like button?
A: If you are using the XFBML version of the button, you can subscribe to
the 'edge.create' event through FB.Event.subscribe.
Source: Core Concepts › Social Plugins › Like Button