I'm looking for away to allow users of my app to chat with each other. Doesn't have to be almost realtime chat say like on an instant messenger. Also i don't want a forum where people write long posts and have topics.
So maybe a chat wall would be an accurate description.
Users would not be authenticated or anything.
Only 1 chat wall, no private messaging or any other functionality besides writing to the wall.
I have available to me a pretty basic hosting server where I can throw up some files, it has MySQL DB and php available to me. I dnt know Php, but is there maybe something that php could do to inject messages into the database and maybe it could return all the messages that were added to the database in the last say for sake of argument, a week.
Another method could be to setup a Twitter account and then have users posting to the twitter page and then reading back all the tweets and writing them to the chat wall in the app. It would seem this could be the simplest solution.
What do you guys think? Any ideas of how this could be handled?
Thanks
-Code
Simplest solution might be to create a simple PHP script that writes to a text or HTML file (Google for examples of that...http://tinyurl.com/6ajjt4r). That file could then be read by your app and either parsed or displayed in a UIWebView.
Related
I have an app where a user creates some object and invites people to interact with it. It's not a game and it's not a canvas app.
I tried to get requests to work probably and couldn't
After reading a bit, I understood that these don't work for non-canvas apps anymore.
So...
1) Does anyone know if this is going to stick? It's extremely painful that stupid games like candy crush are allowed to create requests, while apps that might actually provide users real value can't. If there's anyone from FB here, I'd really like to understand why this discrimination is taking place?
2) Are there any alternatives? Sending a message or feed post are possible but, I need to either a) generate a unique link per invitee or b) get the list of people the user sent the link to. Both don't seem to be an option with messages and feed dialog.
3) Is is ok to just embed my web app in the canvas as is?
Thanks
Yaron
Facebook policy indicates that you should not use app requests to send users to an external website. However, an embedded web canvas app is fine. It will let you use the apprequests function to render the Request Dialog and provide a user invite experience similar to the most popular Facebook games.
I'm building a site for a non-profit festival where we'd like to have a 'media' page which brings in photos from instagram (hashtag search), updates and photos from Facebook (via festival's albums) twitter posts (by user and hashtag).
I've tried the JS widgets for Facebook and Twitter but wondered about using PHP/Codeigniter to pull the feeds and caching them somehow for better performance and more control over the look.
Would it be best to then store the feed data in a json file on the server or in a MySQL record?
I'm leaning toward a table with a record for each feed that would basically just store the feed URL, JSON, last updated time and an identifier of some sort.
Then I could write a class with the following type of methods:
get_feed($id='facebook_updates', $expiry_time=3600);
Does this seem like a reasonable way to go? or is there a better solution already existing?
I'm not quite sure how I'd work that in with the feeds that need Auth (twitter & Instagram)
bro!
First, it does seem a reasonable way to do it and I don't know any better.
But, if I had to accomplish that, I would break my problem in two:
A server side code to grab the info from the services (that I would
probably store as json so that I could use the info returned
directly) running with cronjobs from time to time.
A client side (server would work too) one to show that info with
customized style.
To work with the feeds that need auth, you'll have to create an app in each of them, authorize it to access your personal account and use it in the code. Never worked with Instagram but the others have good documentation on how to do that.
Finally, with some modification, you may be able to use this wonderful too to help you accomplish your task: http://plugins.in1.com/socialist
I would really appreciate some help with the Facebook application I currently work on.
I developing a simple Facebook application, and I need to store the data of the people, who click the "I want to win button". I'm not sure if I should use plain, old vanilla PHP, or if the Facebook API provides some simple way to do that, so I would be really glad for some ideas about this.
I read about the topic, but I can't really "see the Matrix" yet, so every answer is appriciated. Also I'm more interested in ideas and not the implementation, as I'm fairly confident in my programming skills.
Thank you everybody!
Richard
You will definitely need to use an external db, coz facebook will not store the data for you. However facebook does store the connection that a user makes with the app, i.e. when a user gives some(even basic) permissions to your app. Hence when an old user comes to your app you can know which, and if it is an old user.
Facebook sends your entry script a signed_request, which contains data about the user visiting your app, this request will have a user_id field only if the user has made the connection/authorized your app, hence you know if it's an old user or new.
Once you have the user_id you can call the graph api to get info about the user. In the php SDK you can easily call $facebookObject->api('/me','GET'); to get user info.
You can easily call the functions anytime, so if you want to make a call when a user clicks your button, you can do that.
Check out the links i have included, thoroughly, you'll get the idea.
I have an idea to develop a Facebook app which notifies the user through SMS when his/her friends come online. The user can pre-select the friends he/she wanted to get SMS notifications of.
This is my first attempt at developing for Facebook so I have zero experience and knowledge about the platform. I just want to know if my idea for such an app is possible? Does Facebook have an API for SMSes? Or do they let 3rd party messaging APIs (such as this one I came across) to work with them.
Thank you.
A Facebook app is actually ran off of your server and you can do anything that you want as long as you stay inside the limits of what you requested as far as information the app needs. As far and getting the information it is relatively easy. I made a extremely complicated app in 3 days. Once you read and get how to pull certain information, the rest is cake walk
I'm pretty new to facebook app. I want to make a simple app for learning. I want to create an app that visits mysite.com/page.json and prints some pretty html. Then i'd like to scan the json for 'private_message' and notify the user (and not publicly post on his/her wall) about the pm and print the message in their notification area.
The later is mostly what i want to learn. Where can i find the API reference? I looked at fql/notification but it looks like its looking at the notifications when i want to post a notification.
Applications cannot send private messages to users. Here is the discussion about it on the facebook developers forums.
Applications only have read-only access to the message inbox with the read_mailbox permissions.
I've gone through as much documentation on this topic as I can find on the Facebook's developer portal, and all I can find are ways to read notifications (the world icon at the top of the page) and mark notifications as unread, but I can't find any way create them. The best documentation I found on this topic was here:
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/user/#notifications
Anyone have better information about this?