The Facebook Photos plugin for WordPress

11 Comments
28 Feb

Facebook I think Facebook is doing a lot of things right in the social web: opening up their network everyone, having a clutter free interface without in-your-face dating ads, turning down $1 billion offers (wait, what??), and the one I’m most intriqued by, releasing an API for developers to play with. Other popular “friending” social networks that I (semi)regularly take part in, like MySpace, Xanga, and Friendster, all don’t even have anything close to what Facebook has developed (no, RSS is not an API). Looking through the Facebook API, it’s actually a pretty well thought out and developed, much like Flickr’s popular API.

So after tinkering with Facebook for a bit, I’ve come up with a simple plugin for WordPress: Facebook Photos. It’s basically modelled after the Flickr Photo Album plugin I wrote, except without the “Album” bit. It basically allows you to easily blog the photos you upload to Facebook from within WordPress (screenshot). So if you use Facebook and have a WordPress blog, download the plugin and let me know what you think :)

Also, since the official PHP client library for Facebook is written in PHP5, this also gave me an opportunity to explore some of PHP 5’s new functionality, especially when it comes to exception handling (finally!). However, until PHP 5 is more widespread, I’m probably going to continue to work in PHP 4 for a little bit longer… since running PHP 5 scripts in a PHP 4 web server will cause it to die a horrible syntax error death, and that’s just not very nice.

Posted on Wednesday, Feb 28th 2007 at 7:19 pm
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11 comments

  1. # Chris Harrison Mar 01, 2007

    I’ll have to try this out, Joe. Thanks for putting this together. Speaking of Facebook ~ if you’d like to connect on there, here’s a link to my profile: http://www.facebook.com/p/Chris_Harrison/500297435

  2. # Brian Moore Mar 05, 2007

    Hey Joe– awesome plugin. I added you on Facebook and I’m hoping I could ask you a question or two about your plugin; I don’t want to take more than five minutes of your time. If you’d rather I e-mail you, let me know (via e-mail! :))

    Thanks again for the plugin.

    Brian

  3. # BB Mar 31, 2007

    Looks like a sharp plugin. Unfortunately, I only have PHP v4.4.3 on my server. I’ll have to wait for an upgrade on that before I can use this nifty plugin you created.

  4. # Uno Apr 12, 2007

    Looks like a great plugin. Would it be able to import photos from aa group? I’m running your Flickr plugin (are they compatible?) and we’re using it for our student newspaper. We’re getting multiple people to upload to a single group and use the photo’s from there. Would something like this be possible? or the ability to add multiple users.
    thanks.

  5. # Eric Jun 06, 2007

    Great plugin! But this one unfortunately does not work on WPMU. Could you please twist that a little bit and enable WMPU user to use that? Really appreciate that!

  6. # vlad Aug 17, 2007

    I am also interested in using this for a facebook group. Does this support that?

  7. # Dozzer Sep 07, 2007

    I can’t get it working on the latest WP 2.2.2

    Shame it’s just what I was looking for!

  8. # McFarnell Oct 18, 2007

    I can’t seem to get this to work with WordPress 2.3. Is it compatible?

  9. # Elco Oct 31, 2007

    I just tried but ill get the next error:

    Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 128 bytes) in /home/sites/vandamgym.nl/public_html/wp-content/plugins/foto book/facebook-platform/simpleXML/IsterXmlNode.php on line 234

    can someone tell what i have to do???

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  11. # Sarah Mar 08, 2008

    please…. create one for php 4 version… :’(

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