Thursday, January 13, 2011

How to (fully) integrate WordPress with Facebook

There are a number of Facebook tutorials, including my own offering examples of FBML to add additional functionality to a Facebook fan page.
However, on many occasions these tutorials fall short of the mark, with no server side functionality currently available via FBML, connecting to databases, or consuming information from other sources is difficult.Third party services fill the gap, but are often expensive, or cumbersome to implement.
One of the most common questions I get asked regarding FBML is how to integrate a WordPress blog, or blog posts on a Facebook fan page tab. This tutorial takes you through the steps of doing just that, with no third party application required.
For my own Facebook page, I have opted to offer exclusive content (not available on my main blog) via Facebook. In addition to that, fans and non fans see a different opening tab, giving them incentive to ‘Like’ the page.

Here’s what we are going to end up with:

1). A tease and reveal tab created via a Facebook application
2). Exclusive content which is only available to Facebook fans
3). Some added spice in the form of Facebook Javascript (FBJS) to cycle the posts elegantly.

Here’s what the final result looks like:

example.jpg

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