I have an iOS app that allows users to post pictures (along with a link, etc.) to their own Facebook feed using the Graph API's me/feed edge.
The images are generated by a PHP script on my server using GD to optimise the image. I would like to serve different images based on whether the feed is being viewed in the Facebook iOS app or on the Facebook website.
I have tried using the HTTP User Agent to detect if a user is viewing the feed item via the FB iOS app or the FB website. However, in both cases, the user agent is set as:
facebookexternalhit/1.1 (*https://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php*)
Any help on how to achieve this would be highly appreciated.
Cheers
Have you looked at all the request headers for both requests? Any difference you can spot between the two?
Alternatively, you can add a parameter to your own requested url from your iOS app; there you have control over the requested url. On your server you can then detect that parameter and render a different image.
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I'm doing preliminary research for an upcoming project. Basically here is the user/data flow:
A webcam at an event takes pictures and sends the photos to a local server
A brand rep has an iPad with an app (developed as an HTML app saved to iPad home screen as an app). The app displays all photos from the local server as thumbnails via simple AJAX calls to load them into the view.
A user selects a photo. That photo will be sent from our local server to our remote server. The remote server will host a Facebook iFrame tab with the user selected photos.
At the same time, a link to the iFrame tab with a query string will be posted on the user's Facebook wall and Twitter (if they choose to authenticate of course).
Now the tricky part, we are 99% sure that the client is going to want to also upload the photo directly to the Facebook user's album. Possibly to TwitPic as well but that is a secondary concern. So my question is, is there a way to use PHP to upload a photo to a Facebook wall without using a typical html file input field and POST? Ideally, if we can do some kind of a file_get_contents on the photo URL from the local server and use PHP/FB API to upload the contents of the photo URL, we'd be in great shape.
The goal is to have the photo uploaded to the user wall with a caption like:
Check out my photo taken at _ event! [URL to client facebook tab with photo id].
#jeremyharris is right to say that Facebook's PHP SDK wraps cURL. You indeed need to use cURL to post a request to Facebook's API endpoint. Though, start by reading http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/ Publishing section to understand the mechanics before you jump onto their SDK.
Then familiarise with the feed object. You can use either it or the photo object to upload the photo.
We are developing a facebook iframe application that pulls some images (via an API) to the current user album (creates a new one).
The user views his newly uploaded album photos using a facebook lightbox clone. In this clone he must be able to comment and like the current viewed photo.
Is there a way to provide facebook comments & like to these pictures without the use of the Graph API (which would require us to replicate a lot of visuals).
Another try was the social plug-ins with the facebook photo url given but no success.
Any ideas?
I would recommend using the social plugins that facebook provide.
For the likes and comments you can specify a URL in the plugin code, that URL should be the URL of the photo relative to your app e.g. http://myapp.com/photo/123 and not the http://app.facebook.com address.
Facebook will need to be able to crawl that URL so if you are checking if the user is logged in via PHP then you should either disable this if the user agent contains facebookexternalhit or show a different page for that user agent. It doesn't matter about the content, just set a couple of og: meta tags and that should be fine.
I'm tryin to develop a (almost) 100% client-side dynamic website by integrating it with twitter, facebook and flickr.
I've been able so far to get the last 4 tweets (with javascript) from my client's feed, and now i was wandering if i could do the same with facebook's gallery and events from their feed.
Especially, what i need (given the facebook username/api key/whatever)
gallery
for each gallery in user's profile:
get the gallery name
get the first picture
get the gallery url
news/events
for each news/event/post in user's profile:
get the event name
get the event text
get the event picture (if provided)
get the event url
I don't want to use the facebook widgets with their rendering, i just need to read the json response (if there's any) and put the data inside my website (like a preview).
Since my client is pretty rusty with "computers (cit.)" but he's (not so strangely) comfortable with facebook/twitter/flickr, i tought about a solution like this before adding a database and an admin interface to our website.
I found some resources online, so i think it's possible (in a way or another). I'd like to do it in javascript, but if it's php i won't complain.
Check out this API to get photoes from the user profile
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/album/
This is for events
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/event/
You can use either the PHP or the Javascript API SDKs:
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/php/
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/javascript/
respectively. Naturally you would handle the returned information differently. Both have a method called api() which can be utilised to grab the album and event objects (as mentioned in another answer):
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/album/
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/event/
You can pass parameters in the methods to restrict the results returned by fields, number of items, sizes of images etc. This is outlined here:
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/
But the issues you are going to face is that you have to authorise your "app" - think website when they use the terminology "app" - to give it permissions to access the information. This takes the form of a two step process. You have to create the app on the Facebook platform which can then access the API methods (only certain information can be got from the API methods without an authenticated app).
The second part is that the user themselves must then authenticate their facebook account against your app - this gives your app permission to access the user's information. In plain English it would go like this:
User visits your webpage; user must be logged into Facebook and must approve your app (this used to be called Facebook Connect for obvious reasons); the app and the user account are "connected"; the app can then use the api methods you've written to return information about the connected user
The beginning explanations of how to do this are here:
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/
The only way you can access a user's (non-public) information from outside of Facebook is via a connected app and user profile.
I have a cool canvas application on Facebook, and sometimes there appear some cool news, some of them are really important, and i wanna notify users of my application about the news by request.
I just wanna them see some numbers of request from my application with a shortcut to my application on their page.
How can i do it in php without any js ?
Thanks!
Request publish_stream access permissions and your app can post to the user's wall using Graph API's /me/feed. There's lots of examples of how to HTTP Post.
Hello I am looking to build a basic API and application/apps system on my social network something like Facebook or other sites have, my site is in php/mysql. Here are some questions.
1)
Basically what I want to do is give a user a API key and secret. After I have these how can I use them in my php app to authenticate a user request which would come from there server?
2)
I can basically build an API to send a request to my server with CURL and get the result back to the page in XML or JSON or whatever, the problem is when sending the request the user would have to know the user ID they want to send to lookup data against, this is fine for an API but I am wanting to have an Apps section where the user's app site would be using the API and would be loaded into my site in the app section with an iframe, the problem is, I need to find a good way to make it where a logged in user on my site can go to the app section and go to an app and there username should be available to that page loaded in the iframe. Facebook and myspace do this somehow and many other sites; I am lost how to get around this hurdle.
Any help on any of this is really appreciated, thank you
Update:
I just had an idea, if I require a cookie to be set when a user visit's my site, then they would have a cookie and it could hold there User ID, then my API script could look for that cookie to exist and grab it's value?
If you plane on using an IFRAME, then no, your API hosted on a separate website (the website inside the IFRAME) would not be able to grab the cookie. The cookie is only visible on the website that it was set for.
I have only used Facebook API with the FBML (not the IFRAME,) but all they do their is basically replace what's in the page with the info that the "tag" is calling. I'm not sure if there is a better way, but you could possibly call a page on the app's server (say the app is hosted at http://example.com/app/, and you called http://example.com/app/?id=28318&name=John%20Maguire,) and have your API code handle it and turn it into a variable?
Maybe you should look into the source code of the Facebook API client.