My fascination with Facebook connect just grows and grows, i absolutely love it and as such i have decided to add it to this blog so that users can login and comment using their Facebook credentials. Obviously i realise that my blog doesn’t get a massive amount of traffic nor comments but i truly believe in FB connect as a platform which can greatly increase the exposure of your site, so lets see how it goes.
I have modified the wordpress plugin from Sociable.es and it is so easy to configure and change. You just upload the entire directory into your wp plugins and then go to Facebook and add the developers application. Once there, click ‘New Application’ and then you will be given a key that you put in the settings section of wordpress. If you get stuck along the way just checkout the readme.txt file that comes with the plugin.
Save them both and away you go. Its worth noting that there are two other wordpress plugins available for Facebook Connect but they are no where near as good as the one from Sociable.
You can use the Facebook Connect form on the right of this page to login and comment from now on 🙂
bugger it, I’ll bite, I’ve logged in via your facebook connect and is just like I just registered via the wordpress interface, so I can understand why this is useful on a blog since everyone (pretty much) has a facebook account these days.
btw Chewie – what information can you see of people logging in via facebook?
hey Ollie,
Thanks for taking the time to try it out. Basically the only info i can grab is your name, profile picture, and list of friends (so you can invite them). Apparently more information if going to be made available in the future through the API.
When someone signs in from FB connect, we check the wordpress DB to see if you are already registered. If not you are automatically registered and your data is inserted from Facebook into the wordpress DB.
Each user then has a ‘profile’ page which is pulling data from both this wordpress database and Facebook (so that i show your correct profile picture and name for example).
E.g your profile can be found at… https://www.chewie.co.uk/?fbconnect_action=myhome&fbuserid=533072467
In the future i would like to hack that page to also show what your friends have commented on, however since my blog is still quite small you probably wont have many friends commenting. On a site like Digg or so, it would be a valuable way to show the users what their friends are up to on the site and maybe raise participation levels.
Hope that answers some questions 🙂