Browse: Home / Development Blog / Page 4

Development Blog

WPBook 2.2.1

By John Eckman on March 27, 2011

Try Again (Photo by Samantha Marx, cc-by license, http://www.flickr.com/photos/spam/3355834452/)

Spent some quality time this weekend with WPBook. As a result, I just released version 2.2.1. (There was briefly a 2.2 release, but something was corrupted in that version of the SVN repo, so use 2.2.1 instead).

Included in 2.2.1:

  • Read More is back. Re-enabled the “Read More” action link. Unfortunately, because of a Facebook API bug wpbook can’t add more than one action link to a post, so no “share” button on wall posts until that is fixed. (Facebook doesn’t add the Share link automatically to posts from the Graph API and there’s currently no way to make that happen other than manually adding it as a link, but I think the “Read More” link is more important.)
  • Post to Group Walls. Added posting options for Group walls, and comment import form Group walls. Because of the way the Facebook API has changed, posting to a Group feed is distinct from posting to a Page’s feed, and requires different syntax.
  • Controlled debugging. Limit the size of debug files created to 500k, so that users who enable debugging and then forget won’t have an unlimited file growing every hour. Also made the debug constant more specific to WPBook so as not to interfere with other plugins potentially using DEBUG as a constant
  • Fopen errors. Clean up DEBUG for cases where permissions fail or file is not writeable
  • Facebook::$CURL_OPTS . Made “disable ssl verification” an option so that only users who need it will have it and others won’t get conflict
  • Required fields are required. Cleanup to the admin screens in general, more clarity around what is required and better language on the admin screens about what is being checked. (Thanks BandonRandon for patches)
  • Better check permissions. Improved “Check permissions” page, to show what options mean and enable links to view profiles, pages, links to validate IDs are correct.
  • Added wpbook logo which had been missing
  • Fix for get_themes() issues with WordPress 3.0.1 through 3.0.5

I realize from the activity in the forums that many users are having trouble with the 2.1 and later WPBook – but I believe all the known errors have been fixed, and most are due to misconfiguration.

A few configuration notes that might help:

  1. Your application ID, secret, canvas URL, and Profile ID must be correct or nothing else is going to work. If you load your application canvas page and you don’t see the WPBook theme, but see just your blog in an iframe (unchanged), then something is wrong in your Facebook Application setup, your WPBook setup, or in a plugin conflict.
  2. Your personal FB profile is absolutely required, even if you don’t plan to publish to your profile’s wall. It is through the FB profile that the access_token for publishing to pages is retrieved. If your FB profile ID is wrong, nothing else is going to work.
  3. Any time you change the Profile ID, the Page ID, or the Group ID to which you are trying to publish, you must visit the Check Permissions page and will most likely need to regrant permissions. Again, if permissions aren’t working, nothing else is going to work.

If you’re stuck, please open a new thread in the wordpress forums and provide the following debugging info:

  • The URLs of your Facebook Application and your blog outside FB
  • The contents of your check permissions page – verbatim
  • What you are trying to publish to – profile, page, group – by ID and by URL
  • What error messages you are seeing, in the WordPress interface and/or in the PHP error log

With the right information, we will be able to get it working.

Thanks

Posted in , , , , , , , , | Tagged

WPBook 2.1.4 Released

By John Eckman on March 21, 2011

Code Bug (Photo by Guilherme Tavares, cc-by license, http://www.flickr.com/photos/guitavares/1703252007/)

Just released WPBook 2.1.4.

Two key bugfixes in this release:

  1. Comment Imports. In changing to the Graph API I needed to add an access_token to the FQL calls I’m using to retrieve comments from non-public streams.
  2. Facebook Avatars for Pages. Given that you can now comment on wall posts as a page (by using the “use Facebook as page” option if you are the admin of a page) some of your comment authors in FB might be pages themselves. This fix will get the right FB avatar for them, eliminating what was otherwise a broken link image.

There should not be any need to regrant permissions or change any Facebook settings in this release.

Thanks to all the users who’ve provided feedback (and debug files!) in the forums.

Posted in , , , , , , | Tagged

WPBook 2.1.2 Release

By John Eckman on March 18, 2011

Quick update – just tagged and released WPBook 2.1.2 – should show up in the repository shortly.

Note that if you’ve already made the changes described in upgrading from 2.0.x to 2.1 you do not have to redo them, though you will have to regrant permissions (in order to fix #s 1 and 2 below).

Three significant bug fixes:

  1. Access Token storage. In 2.1 and 2.1.1 I had been storing the access_token Facebook returns after granting permissions in the user_meta table, which worked, but only if you were always publishing in WordPress as the same user who granted permissions. (The same WordPress user_id). Now this gets stored in the options table and works regardless of who is logged in, which makes more sense for the publish action in the first place.
  2. Publish as a page. This required getting the “manage_pages” permission, so you will need to regrant permissions (visit the WPBook options page, click on the “Check Permissions” link inside the Stream/Wall options section, and then click on “regrant permissions” on the resulting page inside Facebook). Basically once you’ve granted “manage_pages” permissions, WPBook looks for the page you’ve identified as a target, and fetches and stores a new access_token that is specific to acting as that page. This access token is then used to publish to the page’s wall, so that they appear to come from the page, not from your FB user id.
  3. Post Thumbnails. This was more badly broken than I thought – not sure how it worked in my testing. (My guess is that FB grabs an image even when you don’t provide one, and may have accidentally grabbed the right one when I test-posted). But it works now, provided you have actually indicated a post-thumbnail (or “featured image” as it is now called in the WordPress admin).

What may still be outstanding is support for WordPress 3.0.1 and potentially other versions between 2.9 and 3.1. Please do open a thread in the forums if you are using an older version of WordPress or having other issues.

Posted in , , , , , | Tagged

« PreviousNext »