Mick Redman: Facebook

Wednesday, 2 February 2011

Sharing data from the Facebook API

In the simple example below I am sending a request to Facebook through the Graph API. I supply my App ID. In return, Facebook provides me with a JSON object. I then process the JSON, using PHP to create a link to my Facebook application. Simple I know, and but that's the point.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang=”en”>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Sharing data from the Facebook API</title>

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/reset.css" />
<style type="text/css">
</style>
</head>
<body>
<?php
$url = 'https://graph.facebook.com/yourAppID';
$JSONobj = json_decode(file_get_contents($url));
echo '<hr />';
echo '<a href="';
echo $JSONobj->{'link'};
echo '">';
echo $JSONobj->{'name'};
echo ' Facebook page</a>';
?>
</body>
</html>

A beginners guide to get your website working with Facebook

Below are 3 steps to :

Get Facebook functionality into your website.
Have a Facebook application presence for your website.

Step 1 :
Register your website to get an AppID here http://developers.facebook.com/setup/
Receieve your AppID and App secret.
You also get an example page with a login and like plugin, which you can extract and embed into your site.

Step 2 :
Seeing this in action gives you the confidence to move to the next stage. You can go to http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins. Here you will see other plugins which can be easily embeded into your site. Some of these plugins are designed to work in co-ordination with the Facebook Page you get with your application ID. This is available through http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=yourAppID

Step 3 :
You may also access the Social Graph API. Documentation of which resides here http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api. An example being that using https://graph.facebook.com/yourAppID will return JSON data about your application.
If for example, your website uses PHP, you may process this JSON data and represent it on your website.