By John Eckman on August 13, 2008
(As of 8/20 – updated again, to 0.7.5).
WPBook, the WordPress for Facebook plugin which Dave Lester and others at Scholarpress originally created and which I’ve contributed some to, has been updated again.
Version 0.7.4, which I just tagged in subversion (so it should be showing up in the WordPress plugins directory by the time I post this) includes the following:
- Works with WordPress installs in subdirectories, using ABSPATH to ensure the right includes get called
- Fixed for the “new Facebook” javascript but remains compatible with “old Facebook” javascript as well (as described here)
- Removed hard coded reference to MyAvatarsNew(); and downgraded to WordPress standard avatars
- Fixed the (previously hard coded) offset for permalinks to be dynamic based on blog’s home url
All in all, this should be a much more stable version for most folks.
Note: If you use the “upgrade automatically” feature in WordPress, you must remember to copy the wp-facebook folder from /wp-content/plugins/wpbook/ to /wp-content/themes/ – it must reside at /wp-content/themes/wp-facebook in order for the plugin to work correctly.
You can get the new version from my plugin page or from the WordPress plugin directory.
Posted in blog, facebook, Open Source, Plugin, scholarpress, Syndicated, WordPress, wp, WPBook | Tagged openparenthesis.org
By John Eckman on May 18, 2008
I presented yesterday at BarCamp Boston 3 on the topic of WPBook, the WordPress plugin for pulling blog posts into Facebook and letting people comment on them with their Facebook identities.
Here’s the presentation file: WordPress to Facebook and Back (Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license)
As always, you can get the latest code here, or see it in action on Facebook.
I found it was very difficult to do a 30 minute presentation here – 45 would have been better, and an hour would have been perfect. I should have spent more time focused on three key aspects: the core WordPress plugin API, the Facebook API, and the bigger picture of how they relate to each other.
That way I could have shown, for example, the WordPress loop and how that works, and some of the Facebook PHP client, and how a user’s request goes through Facebook to your WordPress blog and back to their browser.
I’ll try to set a bit more context in my Twitter talk later today, though 30 minutes will be a challenge there as well.
Posted in barcampboston, bcb3, Boston, facebook, Open Source, presentation, Syndicated, WordPress, WPBook | Tagged openparenthesis.org
By John Eckman on May 15, 2008
(Update 5/17 – 0.7.1 is now available – bug fix release).
I’ve spent some time over the past few nights revising the wp-book plugin, which lets you bring your WordPress (self-hosted) blog into Facebook as an application, and I’ve published a new 0.7 version.
You still have to add the Facebook developer application, accept their terms of service, and get an API key to be able to deploy your blog-inside-facebok, but the plugin no longer requires creation of an extra page nor editing of your existing themes.
Instead, inspired by Alex King’s excellent “wordpress mobile” plugin, wpbook now asks you to install an additional theme, wp-facebook, into your theme directory, and then uses that theme when it senses it has been called from inside facebook.
This means you not only get a few recent posts, but in theory all your posts, available inside Facebok. Once I know this release is stable, I should be able to start rolling out additional features like archive links for years, months, categories, etc.
As before, you can see it action with this blog’s content on facebook: Open Parenthesis.
You can download it from here, it should also get populated into the WordPress plugin directory soon.
Posted in blog, facebook, Plugin, Syndicated, WordPress, wp, WPBook | Tagged openparenthesis.org