I'm very confused so I hope that my question will make sense.
I'm working with the facebook API, and so far I've implemented login and a post to the users wall via php. I know read a bit more about the OpenGraph system, and the meta tags that you're supposed to put in your site, but I'm not quite grasping the concept og how to get my site fully PHP integrated with Facebook.
I have another login system which I've hooked facebook up to, so switching to javascript only will not be an option. Do the meta tags even matter if I use PHP only. I mean, I can't really get my head around how the token and all of that would be interpreted alongside the og: metatags if there is no javascript on the site.
Can I have BOTH php and javascript authentication? What's all that fuzz about opengraph anyway?
These are my thoughts about working with facebook, and if you'd like me to summarize this up in one question I guess it'd be:
How do I benefit from the opengraph meta tag features (tracking the users, in their timeline) when I'm only connected via PHP?
I'm confused about how the tags for specific open graph actions get interpreted like
<meta property="fb:app_id" content="xxxxxxxxxx" />
<meta property="og:type" content="myapp:read" />
and then it's supposed to post "MyName is reading lalala" or "MyName read lalala". How's the post to the server going on (if people have already authenticated via php):) ?
Unless I am misunderstanding your question, I think you are confusing how the Open Graph meta tags work. The meta tags provide external websites with exactly what they say: meta information, to be read by Facebook's "crawler". Facebook has their own web crawler that will grab certain relevant information about a webpage (for example, page title, page description, an image to associate with a webpage) so that Facebook can use that info when people "Like" or "Share" a webpage.
For example, going to https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http://example.com should illustrate how the crawler works: when someone tries to share the URL example.com on Facebook, Facebook's crawler goes to the example.com webpage and grabs relevant info, then displays it on their own page to allow you to share it with others.
The open graph tags have little or nothing to do with authenticating a user or application on Facebook's servers. They can be used totally independently of any login system that you have in place, as far as I know. All they do is provide meta information about a web page to Facebook's web crawler.
I understand your frustration with Facebook's API though - they are notoriously bad about keeping detailed, accurate information, and they change the API so frequently it's nearly impossible to keep up.
I can confirm that you're not the only one to be frustrated with the Facebook Documentation.
With that being said, i'll try to help you. As Sean said, the og graph tags have little or nothing to do with your authentication flow.
These are featured as information of what the user is doing at a certain time, like listening to a song, playing to one particular game, etc...
The Facebook's PHP SDK provides you functions to create your own objects and actions. Then you can call a $facebook->api(/...) function to indication to Facebook : My user is ACTIONS an OBJECT. Doing this, you must provide a parameter, which is the URL of the OBJECT on your Website/Application. In fact, Facebook wants you to tell him where he can finds what's this object. On a page where there's the correct meta-tags corresponding to this object ! Here are your og tags.
As you said, this will provide stories found in the timeline, or the ticker. It's those kind of things that Facebook Games use, "X is playing to Y", "Z earned the Grand Master title by playing on A", etc...
You must define those objects on your Facebook Applications Panel, and have the corresponding meta-tags on your website.
Then you just have to make the $facebook->api(/...) (or equivalent) request when this action happens on your website/application !
Everything is almost entirely explained in this tutorial : http://developers.facebook.com/docs/beta/opengraph/
Hope this will help you to find an answer.
Related
I am not sure this is correct SO to post on, but if not admin please feel free to move it to relevant SO or suggest me to move it.
I am using a contractor to help me create a website for some project. He has coded the entire custom website in PHP.
One feature that I requested was that links posted on the website should have the preview feature that we see in Facebook (FB) like in attached picture.
But he keeps saying that I can only use embedded code to create such preview feature. When I show him the FB preview he says FB is probably using technology of its own. Currently if I post the link from youtube to my test website it shows up as text like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtkUtNzaFPI&t=1909s
My question is:
What exactly is FB using? Is this easy to implement for any PHP developer or is it really time consuming implementation.
"he says FB is probably using technology of its own"
His answer to your question is utter nonsense, and indicates only that he doesn't want to do what you're asking. You hopefully aren't paying him very much.
What Facebook is doing is kind of sneaky, but structurally simple. The order of operations is:
User enters text on Facebook page.
AJAX request is sent to Facebook server with text.
Facebook server parses and sees that there's a link in there.
Facebook server makes a server-side HTTP request to link destination to find out more.
Facebook server parses response for anything it can add to the input template that the user is seeing.
Facebook responds back to user (maybe web sockets? maybe a response to that earlier AJAX request?)
Client-side code on the Facebook page updates what the user is seeing.
Steps 2-6 intuitively sound like they may take a lot of network time, but these tend to be very quick services (Facebook itself, YouTube, etc.) so that's usually not a problem.
The main concern here are Step 3 and Step 5. That's where Facebook is using some custom logic that it likely spent considerable effort defining. There may be libraries which help with that, likely made in response to the demand for this exact feature. I don't have any to recommend, sorry.
The technical implementation is the easy part. Determining from the user's text what data to fetch could be difficult. Determining what data to put in the page could be difficult. That depends on the scope of what you want to implement.
For example, it may be difficult to detect if the user has entered a variety of things you can respond to, but it may be easy (with a regular expression perhaps) to detect if the user has entered what might be a YouTube URL. So if you reduce the problem space to just YouTube previews, then you may be onto something. If you can successfully parse that YouTube link, you're in business. Now you can hit a YouTube API and get information to send back to the page.
Continue with that pattern for other small problem spaces (previewing a link to an image, previewing a link for another popular site, etc.), and you can over time add that same feature.
Is it possible to shows posts, feeds etc in a customized manner on your website? For example if I don't want to use the plugins they provide to embed on your website which show posts in a rectangular box I want to show posts from these social media sites in different manner. For reference please visit this website and scroll down to section below Latest News and Testimonials you will find Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ with Lorem Ipsum text. It seems like this website has also not implemented this feature (don't know if its possible with all social sites) but I am asking if you need to implement something like this is this possible? I have to implement it on a PHP website, if that helps. Thanks for your help in advance.
Although you're asking for something different than embedding, I still believe what you're looking for is "Embedding posts". Most social sites do not want you to rebuild their stream experience and put it somewhere else -- additionally, most content policies on these sites prohibits you from caching or storing posts because it can easily become a privacy issue. Finally, if you're pulling a lot of posts, frequently, from these services, you will encounter API call limits.
The following resources should get you started with properly embedding posts so you don't have to worry about how you're caching:
Google+
Facebook
Twitter
If you (really, really) wanted to build out your own solution you should do it client-side in JavaScript, not in PHP. For this, you would need to use the following APIs:
Google+ uses the Activity API
Facebook has the Graph/Feed API
Twitter has the Search/Get Tweets API pass from%3A[username] to get specific user Tweets
If you were to try doing this in PHP, it would be easier using client libraries and starting from sample code.
Google+ PHP example
Facebook PHP client library
Twitter PHP client libraries
Make sure that you're following the content policies of the various sites you're aggregating. In other words, if you're doing something like caching the results in a MySQL database pulled using your PHP script, invalidate the cache every 3600 seconds and every time a post is no longer retrieved from your API calls.
If there is a link posted on Facebook to my website, and a user follows it, I would like to display custom content using PHP. I tried with the following method...
$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']
Facebook must block this feature because it is not working. Is there a method for this that actually works with Facebook?
This news is a year old, yet I see they are still using it.. I post it here because It is still pretty informative The srouce of the link is https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10151070897728920
Restricting the Referrer
We still need to let the websites you navigate to know the traffic is
from Facebook, but we also want to prevent them from reading the full
source url. Otherwise, they could know where on the site you were when
you clicked their link. In order to strike this balance, we've taken
advantage of a new feature called the meta referrer, currently
available in Chrome 17+ and Safari 6+. This allows us to specify how
much of the source url to share with the external site via the Referer
header. If you're using one of these supported browsers you can take
advantage of this new feature. Otherwise, your browser will be routed
to the slightly slower older system.
This change should reduce the impact of the link shim on your browsing
(especially when accessing Facebook from a cellular network) and
should help save around a second for a typical user.
I've got an algorism that is calling the Graph API to grab the posts of fan pages that we don’t have in our database (to make statistics on them).
We call the Graph API with an app token, and with “normal” fan pages (no located posts), we don’t have any problems, we correctly have all posts.
But when we try to grab country located posts, the Graph API returns to us nothing. I think it’s due to the fact that an application don’t have a language (by default), so to resolve that, I take the access token of an admin of the page and then the Graph API give me all the data I need.
My question is simple : Is there a way to grab country located data with app token ?
Thank you for your answers !
Unless you own that page, no, there is no way. This would create a privacy issue where the Graph API can be used to display otherwise restricted content. This applies to age and alcohol restrictions as well.
I am having problems to link the Facebook Like buttons in my website with the OpenGraph Objects.
Since a couple of days, I have updated the metadata of my website declaring specific sites as different OG Objects. This is working fine, since
- the Facebook Debugger is accepting the URLs and recognizing them as OG Object with no errors
- the insights of my App shows me a very big increment of the Object Lifecycle from the moment these changes became live
At this point, I would have expected that every like button pressed in each of these sites would publish something similar to
"User1 likes a ObjectTitle on App"
but the message generated is still "User1 likes a link" or "User1 likes a page"
Is it really not possible to connect the original Facebook Like Button with an OpenGraph Object?
Do I need to create a "Built-In Like" to publish such a Story in a User's Timeline?
Do I miss something here? or is anyone having the same problem?
Thanks! I appreciate any kind of help.
Is it really not possible to connect the original Facebook Like Button with an OpenGraph Object?
Yes, that is exactly what you are doing. All your URLS that have been debugged and liked are now objects on the Graph.
Do I need to create a "Built-In Like" to publish such a Story in a User's Timeline?
Yes you need to use the built-in like action to achieve this, but Facebook will mostly likely reject your request to submit the action if your reasoning is not strong enough for not using the regular like button.
You need an object that is significantly different from a regular article page (e.g. a recipe)