Development Blog

UPDATE 2 (1-28-09): Seems that the WPBook plugin conflicts with the BadBehavior plugin – I’m looking into options to see if the conflict can be eliminated, but if your WPBook install is not working try disabling BadBehavior.

UPDATE (1-26-09): As noted in the comments below, there is a bug in the copy of the Facebook library included with the Sociable Facebook Connect plugin. If you’re using that plugin, you’ll need to patch their copy of the Facebook client library as follows.

Change line 170 of /wp-content/plugins/fbconnect/facebook-client/facebook.php from:

http_header('Location', $url);

To:

header('Location', $url);

This will eliminate the conflict between these two plugins.
(End UPDATE)

Today I’m releasing version 1.0 of WPBook, the WordPress plugin for embedding your blog in Facebook.

If you have earlier versions installed, you should see an auto-update notification on the plugins page of your WordPress dashboard. (Note that WordPress checks for updates only every 12 hours).

This version includes the following new features:

• Added option for “Share this Post” – user determines whether or not to show “Share” links on posts
• Added option for user to enable or disable comments from Facebook – does not affect comments left on the blog directly
• Moved the “Invite Friends” (also an option) to the top of the application next to the “Add to Profile” link – these two options should be high visibiility to encourage use
• Added option for “Give Credit” which shows a “This Facebook Application powered by the WPBook plugin for WordPress” byline at the bottom of the Facebook canvas pages.

Here’s what the new admin looks like:

WPBook Options Page (Click for Full Size)

It also includes the following bugfixes:

• Added simplexml44 library (BSD Licensed) for the php4client, eliminating the need for user to locate and install
• Cleaned up CSS for “recent posts” in main page – list items were not enclosed in a <ul> tag
• Added fix to facebookapi_php5_restlib.php which affected hosts where curl libraries were not present or enabled

As well as, of course, the existing features from earlier releases (see 0.9.7 and 0.9.3 for more on these):

• Canvas page showing recent blog posts in a Facebook iFrame, meaning blog posts can contain video, flash, javascript, etc – not that Facebook does impose some restrictions.
• Profile Boxes listing 5 most recent blog posts which can be added to user profiles and pages
• Share this Post links, enabling default Facebook “send a message or post to profile” functionality for individual blog posts
• Invite Friends option to enable users to invite their Facebook friends to install the app

Get WPBook 1.0 on this blog or at WordPress.org.

UPDATE: Comments closed here. Check this page for most recent launch announcement and comment on the most recent version.