Creating a "Latest Posts" Facebook Tab

I’d be interested in feedback on this plugin, which just went live on the WordPress repository.

The Facebook Tab Manager for WordPress allows you to create landing pages and other types of content to be displayed within Facebook, particularly within the tabs that appear on Facebook business pages and pages for other types of organizations. This provides a way of putting more interesting layouts and functionality into your Facebook pages, without the need to get too deep into fancy programming.

The Facebook Tab Manager was specifically designed to take advantage of a recent Facebook page redesign that added support for iframe tabs on Facebook pages.

Tab content can include any WordPress content, including output from Shortcodes and other plugin functions.

@davidfcarr: I’m a bit confused as to how this new plugin differs from WPBook? If it could accomplish what I explained in my previous posts, I’d be very interested!

I won’t criticize WPBook because honestly I haven’t tried it. But my understanding is that it uses an integration technology Facebook says it is phasing out, FBML, for content in page tabs. The documentations says WPBook supports either FBML or iframes for independent FB apps. FB’s support for iframes in page tabs just came out last week, so probably WPBook will have an update shortly to support that. You’ll have to make your own judgement about whether that’s the more full featured plugin for your purposes.

Facebook Tab Manager was specifically designed to capitalize on this new iframe capability. I wanted to make it relatively simple to create/edit content in WordPress and publish it to a Facebook page tab. You can see a couple of examples (tabs labeled Tab Manager and WP Tab) at https://www.facebook.com/carrcomm.

I just put out an update that makes it relatively easy to integrate a blog post or page or category, or list of headlines from a category. Also provided some tricks for taking advantage of Facebook social plugins, such as the like button and comment box. I’m providing running commentary on my blog as it evolves.

Thanks for the answers David! I’ll be giving the new plugin a try one evening this week!

@davidfcarr – not really an accurate picture of WPBook.

One thing wpbook does is allow you to add a tab to your Fan page, which will show your latest blog posts automatically – for that, it uses FBML because that was all that was available when it was built. We will transition to iframes for that.

More importantly, what WPBook does is produce a Facebook Application which is a live view into your blog – compare apps.facebook.com/openparenthesis and https://www.openparenthesis.org for an example. Comments made inside facebook show in wordpress and vice-versa. For this view WPBook uses an iFrame – so any post or page you create in WordPress also has a corresponding page/post inside the FB application.

WPBook can also post excerpts of your blog posts to your wall (or the wall of your Fan page or your group) whenever you blog, and imports comments made against those excerpts to your WordPress blog.

Fundamentally different use case than using WordPress as a CMS to power custom tabs in Facebook for specific content, I think.

John, no offense intended. I tried to make it clear that my familiarity with WPBook didn’t go any deeper than looking at the website for it. Sounds like what I cooked up is targeted at different uses anyway.

It may be safe to say that WPBook is more of the Swiss Army Knife and David’s Facebook Tab Manager (which I haven’t tried) is more of just the corkscrew.

This isn’t to devalue David’s work just to say that it seems to be aimed at being a plugin for a single purpose. I think which to use really depends on what you hope to accomplish in the end. It’s not as simple as comparing the two on features.

My app is the corkscrew, absolutely.

@david No offense taken, truly – just clarifying. ??

@david: I’ve installed your plugin, and am afraid that the setup is still too complicated for my purposes. I’m looking for something that will allow blog owners of my Multisite install to easily set up a Facebook tab that will show only their own posts on their Facebook pages, without them having to touch the FB app developer stuff.

Thanks anyway!

@justbishop I still think your best bet may be to use WPBook or David’s plugin then create a “Homepage” that list all the pages. Then you should be able to link to apps.facebook.com/yourapp/username? Is the problem coming in when it comes to letting them add the app as a tab? I wonder if there is a way to create a new database setting that tells the app what page to go to. This may let the user set their own homepage.

For example when you go to the app it has a box that says “User of homepage for app” then they enter in the Username you store the username and userid into a database table (either dependent or independent of WP) then when they go to the app you see if that setting has been set if so you show that app.

I know it sounds sorta confusing but i hope it helps.

You totally lost me. It’s the Multisite aspect as well as the Facebook side of things that’s going completely over my head :/

I thought your site was BuddyPress is that correct? Do your URLS that you want to link to look like riotcart.com/username? If so WPBook (or I think David’s new tab plugin) would take riotcart.com/username and show that inside the tab view.

If that’s the case you should be able to make a static page that list all of the “/usernames” urls wihth links and set that as the callback url.

Then all the user would have to do is visit the partent page of the app and click on the user they wanted to see.

What I was talking about with database is have it so that the user can set a defalt “/username” and then you would save their facebook ID and that username (in a database) to associate on next visit. That should allow them to set that username as a page tab.

I’m not sure that I understand what you’re trying to do 100% though. I hope that’s as clear as mud ??