Archive for October, 2009

As we reported a few days ago the way that Facebook feed stories work is changing to a new system.  The new system can be used right away, but the old system will be depreciated (in other words it will stop working) on 20th December 2009.

If you have looked into the new system of feed stories on Facebook it may have left you a little bemused. The example code they give is a little confusing and doesn’t quite work ‘as-is’.

After much experimenting, hitting my head against the proverbial wall and wading through page loads of posts on the developer forum from people who clearly were having similar problems, I came up with some code that works.

Let us look at this example first which requests extended permissions and then posts a feed to a users wall.  Extended permissions is the new feature where your application has to ask the user to grant permission to access or post to their wall, send them email, have offline access, send them email, etc.

The good news is that buried deep in the explanations on the Facebook developer site it turns out that there is still a way to simply pop up a request to post a feed to the users wall without the extended permissions but it is not accessible directly from the php library. However I will show you that code in a moment.

If you haven’t already you will need to download the latest facebook php libraries.  As always these are downloadable from

http://svn.facebook.com/svnroot/platform/clients/packages/facebook-platform.tar.gz

Here is my modified version of the code which I have turned into a demo that asks you for extended permissions and then posts a sample feed to your wall.  You will notice that I only ask for ‘publish stream’ permission since it is all my application needs.  I would strongly recommend that you only ask for what is necessary as users are already going to be a little wary of granting permissions so the fewer you ask for the more likely the user is going to accept.

Here is the code: (there is a downloadable zip file with all the code samples at the end of this article).

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When it comes to finding a suitable web host to run social network applications it is well worth carefully reading the terms of service for your chosen host before signing up.

I run a number of Facebook applications including a games that fall into the mafia/adventure game category. These are commonly called RPG’s (role playing games) or MMORPG’s (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games). But if I was to host with some of the popular or well known web hosts I could find myself in breach of their terms.

For example if we look at the terms of service for popular choice ‘HostGator’…

Terms of service from Hostgator.

Now the chances are while your application is new and not getting that much traffic you would probably get away with running an rpg game app, but imagine how inconvienient it will be and how much ad revenue you could lose if your host suddenly pulled the plug.

So when you are shopping around for a good web host be sure to read their terms of service VERY CAREFULLY and ensure that there is not going to be a problem running the kind of apps and sites you need to run.

For those who are interested, the host I now use (after a lot of research and trialing a lot of hosts who turned out to not be any good) is Valcato Hosting.  They consistantly score highly on the independant review sites and their support is top notch. They also give unlimited databases and have full cron job support.  They have a package that costs just £3 a month and is ideal for anyone starting out with social applications and it can be upgraded easily if you end up with a run away success application that needs hordes of bandwidth.