I have successfully setup an iFrame based App using the Javascript SDK, and we are trying to enable it on a Page Tab.
It seems Facebook has changed some things lately, because the app breaks when added to the Page Tab. I even went as far as making sure that all external scripts were included in the main index.php file, and that the body tags were taken out.
No, I'm trying to find out if it is even possible to use methods such as the stream.publish within a Profile Tab at all.
It seems like it isn't. As far as I can tell, you can no longer use any social methods on the Profile Tab.
Here were two related articles on the subject:
insidefacebook.com/2010/08/19/facebook-moving-toward-iframes-over-fbml-for-canvas-apps-and-page-tabs/
-and-
developers.facebook.com/roadmap
If anyone can confirm or deny this, it would be a huge help. The Facebook docs are just all over the place.
Here's a link to the working App Canvas as it stands now: http://apps.facebook.com/votetesting/
I know that on tab pages, you cannot do any JS until the user clicks on something first. Maybe that is the problem.
-Roozbeh
Related
I inserted the facebook code where required and absolutely nothing happens or shows up. Using dreamweaver cs6 and in live view or when testing in ANY browser, nothing shows up. It's a blank box. ANy thoughts? I read somewhere that the website must be made into an application of facebook? Is this something?
Specifically, after activating the plugin and properly connecting the plugin to the facebook app,which does work and has been used extensively before hand, comments simply fail to load. There is no comment box, no past comments pull in either (note the app has historical comments already).
In the plugin settings area on the right side of the screen where the comments check box exists, there is a read more link that takes you to the facebook developers page where it discusses adding the facebook comments iframe.
If there is some other location where comment settings might also exist (past the three fields that require the 2 keys and the app name) I could not find them and this was not referenced in the plugin setup.
When going to the set up pages for all the Social Plugins, they now provide example code using an APP ID.
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/
Is an APP ID now required for the Like Button and other plugins? What happens if an APP ID is not included when using the plugins?
I've checked the Facebook developer blog and read about the Like Button Migration. I haven't been able to find a straight answer for this either there or in the FB Like Reference.
Notice:
This is an old dated information, the official facebook's behaviors are changed.
Simply, the answer is No, just look at the following official Facebook resource.
Notice: To do it without need to the app id, you have to visit the above page when you are signed out from Facebook. Look at the following screen shot.
As semsem said, the simple answer is "no it is not required"... there are ways to get around having an appId associated with the "like" button. Here's my experience working with this. I'm not a Facebook or Open Graph expert, so YMMV.
Why we avoided using the appId on the button:
We're providing an service where we have one website (the engine, as it were) that provides a service distributing online courses to students (customers). Instructors (also customers) who what to use our service to disseminate courses to students can brand the site how they wish, and map their domain to their section of our website that serves those course(s).
As a simplified example: we serve from http://courses.example.com/instructor_name, but we want students to access the content through http://www.instructors-domain.com/. Any courses would be sub-directories off the base URL.
Associating the "like" button with our Facebook App disallows any cross domain shenanigans. While there are valid reasons for doing so, it doesn't work for where we're at in our company and product evolution. So we needed to find a workaround.
We wanted to allow folks to "like" a course, have the "story" point to the appropriate places on the net, as well as get some customization (e.g. "NAME likes an online course on FBAppName"). We basically achieved this. We lost some functionality which we deemed acceptable at this point in our evolution.
The short of it
I used the iframe version of the Facebook "like" button as dictated by the appropriate Facebook developer's page (for the link see semesm's answer for the link, I got no rep). I took their code snippet and manually removed the appId query string in the iframe's src.
In the "liked" page itself (which was the same page that had the "like" button) I used the Open Graph meta tags including specifying the appId. (These tags were specified: fb:app_id, og:type, og:url, og:site_name, og:title, og:description, og:image.)
The og:type was our custom type of the form 'namespace:app_custom_object_name'.
A failed approach
My first attempt was to use what I understand as the preferred method, the "HTML5" tab in the "Get Code" section of the developer's "like-button" page. I tried their method stripping the appId from the appropriate places. This method proved ineffectual.
If the domain doesn't match that in the Facebook App, there will be no "like" button.
If the domain does match, the "like" button will appear. However, it takes 3 clicks to actually "like" something. The first click changes the "thumbs-up Like" icon to a normal anchor with one word that didn't make obvious sense (I forgot what the word was). The second click will brings up the login/authorization window for using our app. The third actually bring up the modern fancy "like" box where you can type in a comment. I didn't find a way around this behavior.
Note that when I specified the appId in this approach on the appropriate domain, it worked as one would expect (though inconsistent with our desired behavior).
I did not try the other two options in the "Get Code" section of the "like-button" page.
Informed speculation and rumor
In my research around this, my overall impression is that requiring an appId is the way of the future for Facebook. Who knows if the old way will be depreciated, probably never, though I didn't find anything in the docs talking about this "legacy" behavior. This makes sense to me with their newer offerings and the advanced tracking that becomes available with this method.
I've seen suggestions that the "likes" used in this manner are akin to second-class citizens... treated as inferior in some respects. In my own experimentation I found the behavior of the fully specified appId (in the "like" button itself) to be different and more accessible and predictable (in terms of Open Graph queries and visibility on my limited Facebook tests) than the partially specified appId. (Again, I've found no solid documentation on this, and did not endeavor to full grok the differences.)
May this info help someone else along. Good luck!
So, I just tried the sємsєм method, as comments say: Facebook want you to login to get the code, and if you have an app, you have to choose one.
But if you don't, it gives you a code without any app reference.
So when you get a code – no matter any app you choose –, you just need to remove the appId parameter in the .js URL (&appId=##############), and you got (for the latest HTML5 code, 6th line):
js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1";
The code for the div element does not change.
I simply use the URL code inside an iframe tag without an appID and it seams to work,
here is an example:
<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<%=request.original_url%>&width&layout=button_count&action=like&show_faces=false&share=false&height=35&appId=" frameBorder="0" width="150" height="25">
</iframe>
According to Facebook's Social Plugins FAQ
Web: If you are using Social Plugins on the web, you do not need to create a Facebook app for integrating a Social Plugin.
iOS/Android: If you are using Social Plugins within a iOS or Android app, you need to create a Facebook app and tie it to your app identifier.
It seems that the official answer is that they are only required for iOS/Android.
In trying to create an "object" page for my first facebook app, I've run into some difficulty. I followed Facebook's Open Graph Tutorial nearly exactly.
After creating an "object" html page with the appropriate <meta property="og:... tags I tried running the URL through the Debugger Tool as suggested in the tutorial but I'm given the following error:
"Facebook URLs aren't scrapable by this Debugger. Try your own."
This page is in the same directory on my company's linux box as the canvas page, and is certainly not a "Facebook URL". If it matters, I'm using an IP instead of a domain name: xx.x.x.xxx/app/obj.html
...
I continued the tutorial anyway, but ultimately it does not seem to want to post a new action/object (is this even right?). I did however manage to get something to work, as in the app timeline view I apparently actioned one of those objects a couple hours ago. I assume this happened when I was pasting curl POST commands into the terminal.
I'm pretty new to the whole open graph, and facebook APIs, etc., so I'm probably operating under false assumptions of some sort, and I've been all over trying different things, but this error seems pretty bizarre to me and I can't seem to resolve it.
UPDATE
I just took the object page and put it on my own personal shared hosting acct. The debugger worked (inexplicably) fine on it, but I couldn't go too far since it's a different domain than the one authorized by my app.
Make sure og:url inside your html page does not point to facebook.
Also, make sure to look at the open graph protocol page (to see you formatted the og tags correctly.
Also, make sure the page is accessible to everyone, not just yourself.
Without knowing the URL it's hard to be sure, but it's most likely that your URL is either including a og:url tag pointing to a facebook.com address, or a HTTP 301/302 redirect to Facebook instead
I recently set up a Facebook page for my organization. Myself and the communications person at my organization have tried to set up a FB like box for my organization's website. When I go through the steps logged in as an organization page, it says I have to switch from using FB as a page to using it as a personal account. When I do that, and go through the steps again, the FB like box is generated correctly. When I take IFRAME text and generate it into HTML, it does not load, nothing shows up. I'm thinking that this is a permission issue or some else...not sure how to fix.
Are you removing the iFrame from the markup? This is an essential part of the like box, and it won't work without it. Seeing some of your markup vs their markup would be awesome. :)
Edit:
I can't tell what the difference is, because I don't have a diff tool handy right now, but here's a JS fiddle where yours doesn't work, and the code I regenerated based on yours does
work.
http://jsfiddle.net/XrSKx/
Upon install of my app on a Facebook Page, I'd like to send the user to an URL with further instructions. I'm starting the installation with http://facebook.com/add.php?api_key=app_api_key&page=page_id, which installs but redirects the user to the Facebook Page itself. It seems like various forms of redirect were available at some point:
Post-authorize callback URL. I can no longer find that in App settings.
The next parameter for add.php. I can't seem to get this to work
I have seen some apps that do redirect upon install, so I believe this is possible. Maybe it's using an old Post-authorize setting that's no longer visible?
Any help or point would be greatly appreciated! I'm also not attached to using add.php, if there's a Facebook Connect method that does this I'd use that instead (I'm looking at profile.addtab though that doesn't seem to work either).
You can set the redirect URL in the app properties. You can no longer set it from the developer control panel in Facebook, but you can still set it using the REST api.
The list of app properties is here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/appproperties/
To set the "post_authorize_redirect_url" you would use something like this:
https://api.facebook.com/method/admin.setAppProperties?
access_token=CURRENTTOKEN&
properties={'post_authorize_redirect_url':'http://mydomain.com/post_authorize_folder/'}
I am not completely clear on this, but I believe the url needs to point to a folder, terminated with "/" rather than a specific file.
The callback gets two parameters:
installed = 1 (true)
fb_page_id = the page id when your app was installed
First page that Canvas is point to should have
< script type='text/javascript'>top.location.href = 'REDIRECT-URL';< /script>
So when your app is opened it will automaticaly redirect to REDIRECT-URL
I'm not sure that you can avoid opening of application canvas page after installing application.