WPBook – Posting to more page types, new site

(photo by hobvias sudoneighm, click for photo page)

Thanks to troubleshooting help from mommyknows and other users, I’ve been able to track down and fix an issue with posting to different kinds of pages.

Thanks to Brooke Dukes, we also now have a site for the plugin itself: wpbook.net – with instructions, blog posts about the plugin, and the like.

Grab 2.0.8.1 from the plugin repository and check it out!

(2.0.8 somehow incorporated a nasty syntax error – whitespace ahead of the opening PHP tag – so skip that and go straight to 2.0.8.1).

For a long time now WPBook has enabled users to cross-post excerpts from their blog posts to either the wall of their personal profile or the wall of a Facebook fan page.

However, in setting up WPBook many users were ending up with:

Your WordPress blog outside Facebook. (Example: www.openparenthesis.org
The Facebook application view of your blog. (Example: apps.facebook.com/openparenthesis)
The Application Profile page for your new Facebook application.(Example: https://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=12797741823)
A Facebook Fan Page for the Blog, or other Fan Page on which the blog gets published. (Example: https://www.facebook.com/pages/WPBook/44062579871, which in this case isn’t a fan page specific to the blog but to the WPBook plugin itself).
Facebook Tabs, which can be added to users’ personal profiles (including your own), or Facebook pages (either a Fan page or an Application Profile page). (Example: https://www.facebook.com/pages/WPBook/44062579871?v=app_12797741823).

Starting with 2.0.8.1, WPBook can instead post directly to the wall of the Application Profile page – which is a nice way of showing potential application users what kind of blog posts come through the application.

Of course, you can post to your own profile’s wall in addition to a second target, which can be any of these:

A Fan Page wall
Your Application’s Profile page
The Wall of a Facebook group

If you post to a Fan Page wall or an Application Profile wall, the post will come from the Application; if you post to the wall of a Facebook group, the post will come from your personal profile.

Settings for Profile ID and Page ID

You should provide your personal Facebook Profile ID in the WPBook settings, and then in the field provided for “PageID,” you can provide:

An actual Page ID, for a Fan Page. (To find this, click on “edit page” – the url will look something like this: https://www.facebook.com/pages/edit/?id=44062579871 – the Page ID is the part after id=)
An application ID, for an Application Profile page. (To find your application ID, go to the Application profile page, the url of which will look something like this: https://www.facebook.com/developers/apps.php?app_id=12797741823 – the Application ID is the part following app_id=)
A group ID, for the wall of a Facebook group. (To find your group ID, just visit your group page, the url of which will look something like this: https://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=149948248362737 – the Group ID is the part following gid=)

As always, please post in the support forums with your experiences.