Facebook WordPress

Wow I was finding how to allow visitors that are visiting my sites to actually login to facebook to kind of link the account. Something like login to my wordpress blog with their facebook account linked. So I went around searching and came across this wordpress plugin, WPBOOK. So I tried.

This plugin is easy to find and it's a free opensource project by John Eckman. Very simple thing to follow and I thought I should share this if you happen to need something like this on your self hosted wordpress blog. Basically it's setting up a facebook application and allow people in facebook to reach your site's content with an application that you could invite. More social interactions to expose your site. Quite fun!

Simply go to your plugins directory in your wordpress dashboard, add new and search for WPBOOK. Once you installed and activated WPBOOK, it has some simple instructions to follow. If you haven't got a facebook developer account, you need one because it's dealing with facebook apps. Simply register one, it's free anyway, and "Set up new application". Fill in information you know, those URL simply put your wordpress blog's. For some of the URL, it will require a slash at the end like this - http://www.vexez.com/ instead of just http://www.vexez.com. It's weird but it worked that way if you happen to get validation fail.

You do not need to fill in all URL in the settings, just get some important ones done and try to save. When you save they will try to validate, fix those validation failed errors and you should be good to go. Get the Application Keys, API Keys and Canvas Page URL to put in the wordpress plugin settings. Read through the instruction and you will be required to allow some extended permission grant from facebook. Just click that link in the settings and grant it.

Okay by now your Facebook Application should be done and showing your blog's content. You need some users before you could submit to facebook apps directory, so hang on and start inviting friends manually!

Support my app too - http://apps.facebook.com/vexezweb/

facebook

Just thought that I shall create a post on the updates I made on this website itself. Several things done and had fun playing around with wordpress, facebook and PHP codings. Good thing I'm one who likes programming pretty much and PHP is really fun and powerful. Also those tools I've created, but not completed, earlier are all based on PHP.

Firstly, I made some appearance changes on the site itself with some feedbacks I got from Digital Point forums. I made the header area smaller again, I suppose now it does not irritate people anymore. Did resizing for CSS styles and those related images. Edited the background, the one you see now with slight orange slanted stripes. A suggestion by one of the DP members, to make it related to the header theme but very slight yellowish. Hope it looks nicer now. And added those boxes for all my sidebar items, previously my adsense sponsored links and share buttons are all dangling around over at the sidebar, now they are all in boxes. Would really like to hear more suggestions and feedbacks for improvements, shoot some comments here :)

Next, I shall talk about some stuffs related to wordpress and PHP. As we all know that wordpress is a PHP based blogging platform, it's really nice to play around with the editor within the dashboard with some PHP codes. I also enabled PHP on my wordpress posts with a wordpress plugin called Exec-PHP. There are a few plugins that does the same but this one seems to be working well for me, which is how I made those tools on my pages to work. Only thing that doesn't go really well is the wordpress "wautop" and "wtexturize" filters. Due to PHP codings on posts and page, those auto beautifying stuffs has to be disabled to avoid errors. So I've got to add <p></p> myself on all the posts now.

Lastly, an interesting thing I've added on the sidebar you can see now is the facebook fan box. I created a fan page on facebook for this website to update things going on here for people to follow on a fan page. Quite easy to make one and it looks good to have some stuffs like that on the sidebar. Simply go to any facebook fan page, if you're logged in to facebook, look at the bottom left of the fan page. You should see a create page button. Try one and put it on your website, it's nice to have. I'll try to explore more into the facebook fan page thingy, the FBML thing for application seems kinda fun. Will explore it some day when I'm free and the interest arouse.

Okay that's all for this post. Follow and support me on my facebook fan page. Throw some suggestions, feedbacks and discussions around and I'll try to response your request. Have fun!