[WordPress Idea] Get Facebook Likes for every post

<?php

// This needs to go inside of the loop

// This is used to get the current ID of the post
global $post;

// The current post ID, which we need to use get_permalink
$thePostID = $post->ID;

// The current url of the post
$url = get_permalink();

/* This looks complicated but it is very easy. It is telling Facebook to do the query that we need that shows the "total_count" of Facebook likes for this single post. It only selects "total_count", but it could select more just by adding anything else. It is also just an sql query. select total_count from link_stat where url='$url' */
$data = json_decode(file_get_contents("https://api.facebook.com/method/fql.query?query=select%20total_count%20from%20link_stat%20where%20url='$url'&format=json"));

// this is the returned value
$fb_stat =  $data[0]->total_count;

// here we update the post meta with the information
update_post_meta( $thePostID, 'fb_count', $fb_stat );
?>

I am trying to do a Top Rated by FB likes on my WordPress install. I was originally going to spider every page and get the likes and update it once a day. And then I thought well, the site is pretty active and it can update every time someone visits it, how can I do that.

Well Facebook has there fbl query which you can get via curl or get contents. Which you can then decode with json. I think the above is pretty self explanatory.

This is just the beginning and shouldn’t really be used on a busy server. I have been using this for a couple of weeks on my busy server and it isn’t much of a problem so far.

If you were going to use this on a heavy server, I would check to see if Facebook likes have changed, and then update it. That won’t add any queries to the loop.

Since I have implemented this over the weekend I made it so the posts are organized by top rated, you can see live example at https://obeygiant.com/archives?top=rated