Development Blog

WPBook 2.0.10 BETA release

By Brooke on October 10, 2010

UPDATE 12/11/10: As John noted in the comments below the most recent beta can be found at the WPBook download page at WordPress. Get the latest copy of 2.0.10 here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wpbook/download/

Today I am uploading a new beta version of WPBook. This version needs some testing before being forked into core so if you download it and have any problems let me know.

You can download the version here

New in this Features version:

Facebook Avatars – if you have the gravtar setting on and the visiter leaves a comment from Facebook (or leaves their Facebook profile url in the url field) you’ll see their Facebook Profile picture instead of their default gravtar. This is true for both your parent blog (outside of Facebook) and the app view (inside of Facebook)

New Admin Layout – The WP-Dashboard admin page has been completely redesigned and organized into three categories: required, Streaming and Facebook App View. The “advanced settings” have been removed and integrated into the appropriate place in the settings. Tooltips have also been removed. Hopefully this layout is easier to use. Thanks to Ozh’s YOURLS: WordPress to Twitter for the inspiration and some of the code that powers the admin interface and the Tango Project for the expand/collapse icons.

Bug Fixes:

The default of “post to facebook” is now set to true

The link in set_permissons=true now links to WPbook.net instead of the old instructions folder in your install.

Other Notes:

Folder Cleanup, the client and cron file includes have been moved to there own “include” folder

The Facebook Tab view has been moved to it’s own folder inside the wpbook/theme folder

Please let me know any feedback you may have on this build

Posted in Syndicated | Tagged openparenthesis.org

WPBook – Posting to more page types, new site

By John Eckman on August 31, 2010

(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.

Posted in Application Profile page, Code, comments, Export, facebook, groups, import, Open Source, Syndicated, syndication, WordPress, WPBook | Tagged openparenthesis.org

WPBook Hits 50k Downloads!

By Brooke on August 31, 2010

I’ve been working with the very talented team of WPBook for the past two years. I have contributed a few ideas and bug fixes. Today marks a very big for us. We just hit 50,000 downloads. That’s a lot of downloads! I would like to thank everyone who has used this plugin over the years and contriubted back their thoughts and ideas, stuggles and love for it. I can’t wait to see what the next 50k downloads bring.