New plugin: official Facebook for WordPress

Facebook has FINALLY announced its official plugin for WordPress.

Since WordPress runs on almost 17% percent of the web with over 650 MILLION (yes you read that right!) unique visitors each month, it was only a matter of time before Facebook would finally develop THE official plugin for WordPress.

The Facebook plugin for WordPress has been a collaborative project between Facebook, Automattic, and several other skilled developers on all sides.

Easy Social Publishing

The new official Facebook plugin was designed to (quote) “make your WordPress site social in a couple of clicks”. It offers powerful cross-publishing from WordPress to multiple Facebook Timelines, including business pages (Yeeeha!) for serious distribution of all of your content.

This WordPress plugin makes your site deeply social by integrating functionality from Facebook. Facebook for WordPress enables you to make your site social in a couple of clicks. No coding needed.

Stream WordPress Page and Post through to your Facebook profile or Business Page

Facebook plugin

All of these very much called for features are enabled through check boxes on the Facebook settings page in the back end of WordPress.

  • Post to an Author’s personal Facebook  profile Timeline whenever they publish a new WordPress Post or Page.
  • Mention friends and Facebook Pages. This posts to their Timelines as well as lists them on the WordPress Post or Page.
  • Post all new WordPress Post or Pages to a specified Facebook Page.
  • Like, send, and subscribe buttons can be enabled in a click and are fully customizable.
  • Facebook Comments, including full SEO support.
  • Open Graph Protocol integration (which is how all this works in reality).
  • Recommendations bar, which allows users to click to start getting recommendations, Like content, and add what they’re reading to Timeline as they go.

Widgets

The plugin also includes three widgets for easy display: Activity Feed Box, Recommendations Box and Like, send, and subscribe buttons. Wonderful as we all currently play with code to get these little wdigets working at the moment.

All of these features are easy to enable via the Widgets settings page.

  • Activity Feed Box. This shows the Facebook user the activity that their friends are doing on your website.
  • Recommendations Box. This shows the Facebook user recommendations of pages they should visit based on the actions their friends are taking on your website.
  • Like, send, and subscribe buttons.

Facebook Insights (http://www.facebook.com/insights) integration is included. This plugin also supports internationalisation and mobile. For more information, check out http://developers.facebook.com/wordpress.

Facebook App Required

Anyone wanting to use this will of course be required to set up a Facebook app after activating the plugin, but it shouldn’t be a problem because Facebook provides step-by-step instructions.

Developer documentation for the official plugin can be found at the Facebook for WordPress page if you’d like to delve a bit deeper into how it works.

Little warnings….

Justa  little ehads up from the Monkeys, be sure to uninstall and remove all the current Facebook plugins and code from your site before activating this one. Otherwise the Open Graph API will get, like WELL CONFUSED and crash on you… EEEK…

Also a little Monkey whispered that you need to updated iun your sevrer end too, many Monkeys apparently running into a “500 internal server error”. In the official support forum for the plugin, the most common answer being posted was:

If your server doesn’t have curl or a complete PHP 5 install, it might not support the code in the Facebook libraries.

So make sure your server is all up to it…

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