Thursday, October 7, 2010

Enabling Facebook Connect XFBML

Enabling Facebook Connect XFBML

There are a couple of different ways of embedding Facebook content into a website. I've chosen to use the JavaScript SDK with XFBML which incorporates the Facebook Markup Language into the page's HTML. This sounds quite scary, but is in fact a simple way of embedding the features using only a minimal amount of code. If you are not familiar with what html code is or what it looks like then you may want to learn some html before continuing (see book review HTML, XHTML & CSS Sixth Edition, by Elzabeth Castro).

The JavaScript SDK is a chunk of JavaScript code that is downloaded to your visitor's browser and converts the XFBML tags into code that your web browser can understand.

The first step to using the JavaScript SDK is to register as an application with Facebook. We won't actually be creating an application as such, but it means that you will be allocated an Application ID which is needed to allow your site to use the SDK.

Register as a Facebook application developer here.

Enter an "application name" and you will then be provided with the following information along with an example page. It's the unique App ID we are interested in here.

App name: yoursitename
App URL: http://www.yourwebsite.com
App ID: 123123123123
App secret:123123123123

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