linking back to facebook tab url - facebook

I added a code to my zencart products page that is integrated into a facebook tab so that a user can "like" a product and it is posted on their wall with a picture of the product and a link back to the product (I copied the code from this site: http://www.navspan.com/ecommerce/facebook-like-twitter-google-zen-cart.htm#comment-305).
The problem is the link back to the product goes to the site but not within the facebook iframe (ie the tab)... it goes to my hosting account that I have the site setup on with a correct link to the product... but again not within facebook...
The two reasons I want it to stay within facebook is: first, the site is styled to be in the iframe and looks broken outside of it and second I want the users to move between their activity on facebook and buying the product on the fanpages tab seamlessly... So here is the code that I don't know how to modify:
<link rel="image_src" href="<?php echo "http://" . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . "/images/" . $products_image; ?>" />
Can I replace the "http://" with the unique facebook fanpage url? but I don't know how to get the fanpage url to go directly to the correct product...
Thoughts?

To link to other pages within your Facebook app, your URLs will need to look something like this:
http://facebook.com/YOUR_PAGE/YOUR_APP?app_data=UNIQUE_CONTENT_STRING
This app_data and several other pieces of data will be POSTed to your server whenever Facebook requests a page. You'll need to create a handler on your end to decode the signed_request extract the string from app_data and then make the appropriate queries on the back end to display the correct information to your user.
I found this example that might point you in the right direction.
I'm not too familiar with ZenCart, but this looks like it's going to be a pretty heavy-duty hack. It would definitely be worthwhile to spend some time looking for a Zen Cart plugin that might do this for you.
If you're going to do it yourself, you'll need to url_encode everything that would appear after the ? in one of your urls and pass this into app_data. So to link to the page that shows your Queen Collar Necklace, your URL would look something like this:
http://www.facebook.com/TracyLoganDesigns/app_422210754456200?app_data=main_page%3Dproduct_info%26cPath%3D1_13%26products_id%3D2%26zenid%3D2e0d1920f964cc9887f74ea0c9b8903c%23.T7VEZsXi1j1
Good luck.

Related

New method to accomplish the same functionality as the old Facebook sharer.php

The original method for sharing links with a custom image, text and link appears to have been stripped from Facebook. I for one would love to see them bring this back.
Here is my situtation. I have a Facebook tab that loads a page that is hosted under my hosteddomains.com. I setup a Facebook app to work with my Facebook tab. When I try to use the new "Share Dialog" if the link I want to share is not the same as the app domains then i get an error and I can't share the link. Am I doing something wrong or is this what they intended to do?
IF that's what they intended to do then there is no way that this will replace what sharer.php could do. I could be on any site and share any link with an image to Facebook and have it posted to my wall.
The question is if i am on facebook tab and i want to share a link (I want a dialog box with a custom photo, title, link, and summary) and allow my users to post this custom message to there Facebook status.
Maybe i am confused about how to accomplish this, but so far i am not having much luck.
I miss the good ole days when i could just construct a URL and that would give me the ability to share what i want to share. Twitter and Pinterest have these methods.
Here are some code examples of things that I've tried that did not work:
Option #1:
The url in this option goes to page that I created on hosteddomains.com that has the Open Graph Meta Tags in it. My idea was to share these pages from my server that will direct them back to my Facebook tab. The result I was getting from this method was seeing the title of the tab from my FB page and description. The reason turned out to be that if i set the og:url to my Facebook tab page, that's the page that would get scraped. That's not what i was expecting from this method. I thought it would take the meta tags from the page i shared and the url with it. Not take all of the info from url and ignore the meta tags.
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=[URL]"
target="_parent">SHARE ON FB</a></p>
Option #2:
Tried using Facebook Share Dialog. I had an interesting time with this one. I setup a new Facebook app. I tried the Facebook tab as the URL and also my custom url to the page that has custom open graph meta tags. The facebook app has two App Domains - hosteddomain.com and websiteA.com. I also created a Page Tab section. The page tab section loads the HTML page that was loaded in the tab we made for our facebook page. Issue with this method is I don't get a custom open graph options set from my php page. I'm picking up information from the facebook tab again. At least now the dialog box shows the name of the new app. I am limited in what i can share using this method. The url i share has to belong to the App Domains. In order to have multiple app domains, I had to make that Page Tab section and then add the second url to the App Domains field, otherwise i got a warning.
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/dialog/share?app_id=[appID]&display=popup&href=[url]
&redirect_uri=[url]&ref=s" target="_blank">SHARE THIS</a>
Option #3
The last thing I tried was the fb-share-button using the Javascript SDK. I get the same result as option #1. I don't think there is much difference between these two. Option 3 here is a bit easier to deal with and cleaner code. In this example, the url is to my custom page on hosteddomains.com that has my custom open graph meta tags. That doesnt seem to matter though. It still pulls the info from the og:url meta tag. I tried removing the og:url meta tag. I get the same result. Is it the Page Tab info interfering?
<div class="fb-share-button" data-href="[url]"></div>

FB Like button unlikes itself

Recently facebook rolled out some changes which have apparently broken like button functionality on on pages I'm working on, particularly for urls that point to a photo (photoset) on facebook, e.g. a facebook button like
<fb:like href="http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=ID&set=SET" ....></fb:like>
The button renders, however when I click 'like' it immediately 'unlikes' itself afterwards. *Non-facebook URLs work fine with the like button, only URLs that point to photos/content on facebook cause the like button to immediately unlike itself after it's clicked. The buttons are generated via the JSSDK as iframes. Is there a solution to this problem? We're not using og metadata.
Facebook like buttons strips all the get parameters of urls, so although you have this
<fb:like href="http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=ID&set=SET" ....></fb:like>
The url retrieved by facebook is this
<fb:like href="http://www.facebook.com/photo.php" ....></fb:like>
EDIT
As you may have not noticed on the 10th of july one of the break changes is the url of the social plugins
Social plugins will require an absolute URL in the 'href' parameter
Social plugins, such as the Like Box and Like Button, will require an
absolute URL in the 'href' parameter.
https://developers.facebook.com/roadmap/#q4_2013
I've always encountered issues with using Facebook's developer tools with resources on its own domain and, for that reason, always recommended "proxying". In other words, you would create a unique resource on your web server to represent the Facebook photo, this resource would garner likes and shares, but when a user visited the page, they would be redirected to the real photo.
For example:
<fb:like href="http://www.example.com/fakeresources/photo.php?fbid=ID&set=SET" ....></fb:like>
When you load http://www.example.com/fakeresources/photo.php?fbid=ID&set=SET:
<meta property="og:title" content="The Rock" />
<script>top.location.href="http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=ID&set=SET";</script>
Unfortunately, for the og:image tag, you will also need to create a proxy, because the Facebook scraper will often not fetch from its own servers.
I've even encountered times when Facebook will not fetch from a URL because the URL has a query parameter which looks like a URL which is on its own servers, for example:
http://www.example.com/fakeresources?url=facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=ID&set=SET
(query parameter not url-encoded for readability)
For which, encoding the URL with rot-13 is sufficient.

Multiple Facebook share button/link on the same page refering different TITLE & LINK

I need to create a "contest" page where user will be asked to submit picture.
After that, they should be able to share their picture on FB, Twitter, G+, Pinterest, etc for other people to come and vote.
I want the page to be displayed as a jQuery gallery and whenever people select a thumbnail, the bigger picture open with the associated vote and "share" button.
When a user share an image, I want a specific TITLE & URL associated with that particular image... something like "http://www.mysite.com/contest.html#picture1"... or "http://www.mysite.com/contest.html#picture2"
How is this possible if I only have one page?
I wouldn't have problem if I could use the old "facebook.com/sharer.php" with parameters... but it seems that the Open Graph Protocol is "overiding" the sharer.php parameters....
Works fine with Twitter and Pinterest... I might have the same problem with Google+.
Excuse my bad english, thanks!
Well, set up a (“dummy”) page for each picture, and fill it with the appropriate OG tags … and have your users like that. And then put a JS redirect into that page, so that users following the link when it’s shared on Facebook will get to the “real” address you want them to end up at.
(Btw., IMHO this is what happens too often these days when people think doing everything client-side and client-side only is so “fancy” and that a “good” and “modern” site requires all that AJAX/one-page-only nonsense instead of a real good and working URL structure, and then are not able to handle all that this implies properly …)

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.

site URL for the facebook like button

I have a problem with the Facebook like button. I want the note on user's profile to look something like this: 'User likes page on site'.
Site's URL it suppose to be 'http://www.example.com/myapp/' and the page URL it's 'http://www.example.com/myapp/page.html'.
I added <meta property="og:site_name" content="..."/> in the of any page and added the like button using <iframe>.
I know that there's a solution to specify the canonical URL, but for the page that user likes, not for the site (that is by using og:url on the header). Does anyone know how you can specify the site's URL? It somehow automatically points to the domain name, which it's wrong in my case because i need 'http://www.example.com/myapp/', not 'http://www.example.com'.
I want the following result: User likes 'http://www.example.com/myapp/page.html' on 'http://www.example.com/myapp', not User likes 'http://www.example.com/myapp/page.html' on 'http://www.example.com'.
Thank you very much for a possible answer.
We've been running into similar problems and in lieu of a og:site_url tag have had to get a little hacky. Our solution is to have our base URL (http://www.example.com in your example) redirect to the FB page.
As we add more FB pages, we'll need multiple subdomains to support this, so it's not really sustainable, but may solve your problem at least temporarily.