i have a tab in a page, with an iframe to a site built up to be like a simple facebook app, where users can create simple profile pages with an image and some text.
Now, once the profile is created (which is a simple html page with its own URL), i need to be able to share it, using some sharing services (like addthis) or even the standard send button. The problem is that the original site has to be always hidden (users have to not be able to see the URL of the "site"), but the sharing system need an absolute URL to know... what to actually share.
Obiouvsly, working in an iframe, the url is always that of the facebook page (it doesn't change navigating the site's pages), so how can I do this?
Thanks.
The problem is that the original site has to be always hidden (users have to not be able to see the URL of the "site")
Why not?
Please don’t say “security concerns” right now, because you should know there is no such thing as “security by obscurity” …
If you just want to have Open Graph URLs, that can be liked and shared, but want the user clicking on one of those URLs end up being in your iframe tab on Facebook again – then do a redirect to your page tab for actual users.
Either do it via JavaScript (which the Facebook scraper does not care about); or with a server-side redirect for any client that is not the Facebook scraper (it’s identifiable by it’s user agent or originating IP address of the request).
Related
I'm working on a photo contest fb app to run in a fan page tab. the user should be able to share the photo in order for others to vote for them.
supposing image link in iframe is http://example.com/image.php?id=1 for particular photo, pressing share will share this link through iframe. which leads up to the host app itself.
what I need is sharing the whole fb app tab page url with http://example.com/image.php?id=1 open in its Iframe.
is that possible in any way?
thanks for help.
So to give the “alternative” to #Lix’ answer, which focuses on canvas apps, here the analog way for page tab apps:
For some reason Facebook decided to do things differently for page tab apps – different than with canvas apps, you can not pass just any GET parameters to your app by appending them to the facebook.com address of your app, but you have to use the app_data parameter for that.
You call/link to your app in the form https://www.facebook.com/YourPage?v=app_1234567890&app_data=foo – and whatever you put as value for the parameter app_data, you will find in the signed_request parameter that Facebook POSTs to your app on initial(!) load into the iframe.
So you parse the signed_request (or let f.e. the PHP SDK do that for you), and then you find the app_data value in there. If you want to pass more than one single value, you can f.e. also put JSON-encoded data there – then you have to decode that again after you read the app_data value from the signed request.
The docs just shortly mention the app_data parameter, but the principle itself is quite simple.
Now, when it comes to sharing those links, I found that when you use an address in the above form, Facebook tends to cut the parameters from the URL, and treat the whole link as just a link to your Facebook page – it shows the page’s picture and description, and does not even pass your page tab app along, let alone the app_data parameter.
I found the most reliable way around this is not to link to your page tab on Facebook directly, but instead to a URL of your own app. When the scraper visits it, you deliver the relevant OG information. And when it’s a real user visiting, you redirect them to your page tab app, passing the data you need via the app_data parameter as described above. Redirecting can either be done server-side (info on how to detect the scraper server-side via its User-Agent header), or client-side via JavaScript (which the scraper does not “speak”).
Sure it is. All you have to do is be able to extract the information from your application canvas URL. If your canvas URL is something like this:
https://apps.facebook.com/ImadBakir
Then you could place some more info in there, like this:
https://apps.facebook.com/ImadBakir?photo_id=123
Users will share that link and now in your application, you can parse that photo_id parameter and make the needed HTML changes to display the correct image inside your iframe as the page and application loads.
With regard to parsing the the URL parameters, assuming you'll be doing it with JavaScript, you can read more about it in this post:
How can I get query string values in JavaScript?
So I'm trying to generate the right URL to go in the facebook Like button. The URL is to a person's facebook page and it's generated using their facebook page's ID.
The facebook like button developers page says that I need to include this URL in the data-href="" attribute in the <div> they provide (that the iframe is generated in).
When I go to a URL like http://www.facebook.com/234h23o4ub23 it redirects to the right place. So I'm wondering if I can get away with using this shorter url as opposed to the url that it redirects to like for example: http://www.facebook.com/pages/example-venue-name/234h23o4ub23. I don't have the "example-venue-name" segment of the URL stored in my database making this method very difficult. Is that page going to register that it was liked or do I have to do the entire URL?
The URL on the like button is actually just what the user will follow back, so as long as the user can follow the link, you will be fine. The link is the unique tracker to the object so that Facebook knows distinct objects.
For example, I have the application starting at index.php. The user navigates to about.php within the iframe, likes that specific page and shares it. What would the structure of the url look like to take people clicking from their own timeline into that page of my iframe?
Thanks!
This depends, if you are on a FanPage it does not work (directly)
on a App Page its easy. You simpley dont link relative in your iframe, but outside to the facebook page itself, for this to work your Canvas url needs to be a directory.
Then you can link to ie. http://apps.facebook.com/yourcanvas/about.php (dont forget the target _top)
On a FanPage the only way i know is to use beside the tab setting, a canvas app page.
in your share code you set the app page as target (with parameter) and on the app page you set a session variable for the desired target and then redirect back to the fanpage.
on the fanpage you look if you have an target value in your session, if so redirect the user.
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.
We are working on a facebook-app with lots of dynamic pages. As the app is embedded in a tab on a facebook page, the urls contain a get-parameter to address the correct tab/app. We want to implement like- and send-buttons for several pages within our app, but facebook seems to dump all get-parameters from urls within facebook. As the result all like- and send-buttons point to the facebook-page itself instead of the tab.
Does anybody now any workaround? We already tried redirects via an external sefor facebook urls only.rver but facebook seems to evaluate the links on click of the like-/send-button (and seems to follow all sort of redirects).
UPDATE:
Here is an example of a problematic url:
https://www.facebook.com/smartmobil.de?sk=app_171502639574871
UPDATE:
The problem seems to be independant of url get-parameters. It seems that the like-button does not work with any url starting with www.facebook.com
When used in a like-button everything behind the ? will be dumped. This seems to happen for facebook urls only.
Best workaround so far is to point your like buttons at external (non-facebook canvas) urls.
To make this work, you need to do some conditional redirecting to get the user back into your canvas URL. You can either use a client side javascript redirect:
<script>
window.location = 'http://apps.facebook.com/yourcanvasname/foo/bar';
</script>
Or you can do a server side redirect based on the useragent string. Basically, if the useragent contains 'facebookexternalhit' then render a basic HTML page containing OG tags, if not, redirect to the canvas URL.
Doing this means the Facebook sharescraper/linter won't follow any redirects back to the canvas URL, but any user that arrives at your URL will get back to Canvas.
i'm too searching for a solution to control the custom page tab's content through a get parameter (app_data). I still don't have a solution but here at least the reason why all www.facebook.com links are srtiped out of get params. Here at bottom the developer explains why.
Unfortunately I don't think what you are trying to do is possible. Posting a like programmatically requires you to specify a Facebook content ID or alias. This won't work for you because tabs to not seem to have an exposed content ID of their own, and instead use the Page's content ID with an additional parameter which you can't use with the graph.
Liking external links and other content that does not have an ID programmatically is prohibited. With an external URL, the first like of an unrecognised URL creates a new Facebook page for those likes to be represented on (which is the issue I've given up trying to fight), but presumably the presence of your Page's content ID alias (www.facebook.com/smartmobil.de) in the url is making Facebook choose you page rather than creating a new one.
The only suggestion I can think of this late at night is to target an external URL that performs a redirect via Javascript, rather than on the server, but Facebook may be wise to that too and I'm afraid I'm going to bed rather than testing it :)