Facebook app for My Yard Our Message

Tuesday I posted some of the technical details for My Yard Our Message. Since then, I’ve been working on putting together a Facebook App to let people show the signs on their profiles. It is done, or done enough to be used.

I’ve played around with building a Facebook app before, but never had a clear strategic need to build one. I found this tutorial very helpful on getting my feet wet. For the moment, the app is written and PHP and talks to the actual My Yard Our Message site via json, rather than rss.

One of the things I am evaluating is whether or not I can set up a system to let people vote on signs directly from Facebook. Obviously, this would tremendously expand our pool of eligible voters, and would eliminate the need to force people to register for an account just to vote. During the building of the app, I went back and forth on the necessity of registration to vote, but ultimately decided it was necessary and laid the structural groundwork. However, I think I can get enough information about Facebook users to know they’re unique, track them, and prevent them from voting more than once.

This would require re-writing the Facebook app at that point, most likely in python and django for closer integration with the authentication and verification processing. There is some initial work done on a Facebook client API for python and django that looks promising as well.

Aside about Facebook pages

I’ve always been frustrated with Facebook apps that don’t work on Pages (as opposed to Profiles). After building an app, I have a new found appreciation for the applications that don’t work. Getting an app to work with pages isn’t really that hard, but it sure is confusing, mostly because of the lack of documentation. The only real documentation is a chat log in the Facebook developer wiki (no, I am not making this up):

(03:02:02 AM) swombat: ok, so basically, "Facebook pages is all transparent uses fbml blah blah blah"

                       "Oh but btw you need to build a completely different piece of code to handle this new type of user"

(03:02:18 AM) swombat: (not angry at you btw :-P)

(03:02:43 AM) fiveofoh: Yeah pretty much

(03:02:46 AM) swombat: this sounds really quite tedious and error-prone though

(03:02:50 AM) fiveofoh: Yeah it does

(03:02:56 AM) fiveofoh: Which is why I haven't done it on my app yet :P

So instead of just this:

$facebook->api_client->profile_setFBML('', $user);

$facebook->api_client->fbml_refreshRefUrl($process_url);

you use this:

if (isset($_GET['fb_page_id'])){

	$facebook->api_client->profile_setFBML('', $_GET['fb_page_id']);

} else {

	$facebook->api_client->profile_setFBML('', $user);

}

$facebook->api_client->fbml_refreshRefUrl($process_url);

Where $process_url is the page that spits out the markup to be shown on Facebook.