Steve's Ramblings

I know its been pretty quiet round here for a bit. Its just been one of those periods of time when I’d nothing really to write about, and even if I did I didn’t really have the time, or the motivation, or the energy.

When I’ve not been working I’ve been bashing my head against the wall over my Wordbooker plugin which I’ve been playing a continual catch up game with Facebook and WordPress and W3C compliance (some of which was nothing to do with me but actually Facebook’s decision to use non compliant tags and people having WordPress themes with not quite the right Doctypes and other things). I’ve been wanting for ages to start on Version 2 of the plugin – which takes a different approach to parts of the posting process and needs a complete re-write of the comment handling process too, but until I’d got the 1.x code base to the point that it was stable enough to leave alone so I could concentrate on 2.0 I couldn’t do that. I’d just got ready to start recoding when Facebook announced they were changing the method of authenticating users against applications… that’s right. Just a couple of months after they changed it totally they are proposing changing it all again. It didn’t help that they accidentally turned on the new method and broke everything!

But things seem to have settled down and so I’ve started coding it, but I also wanted to watch “Travelling Man” which Nick had bought me on DVD for my birthday after we’d both read Andrew Denny’s blog entry about it. It’s been quite enjoyable watching it and recognising a lot of the locations, even if they have changed a lot since it was shot : for example the derelict warehouses near Preston Brook have been turned in to rather up market apartments – but it was good to see that Claymore Navigation’s boatyard hasn’t changed much in the intervening years.

So today I’m having a day off work, and I could be coding but instead I’m listening to Bob Geldof’s solo albums and trying to rustle up enough motivation to do much more than slouch on the sofa all day. I know that some would say that NOT listening to them would be enough motivation to get off the sofa, and others might say that listening to them just sucks motivation away from you, but hey… it’s my day off and I’m waiting for the Dishwasher to go through a cleaning cycle!

Things move fast in the IT world:  Oracle spit out a new version of their database every couple of years, Microsoft keep…. well actually the less said about Microsoft the better to be honest, and as for Apple……

I’ve been coding away on my Wordbooker Plugin since the tail end of last year. I had great plans for version 1.8.  I was going to add internationalisation and completely rebuild comment handling from the ground up as its not really working properly.. Hey I coded it in a day and bolted it onto the existing code so what else would you expect…

So I’d got all these plans worked out in my head and then along came Facebook and their developer conference (F8) who shoved a huge great spanner into the works.

Now for those who have never tried programming against the Facebook API you wont know just how annoying it is. It is rather like trying to nail jelly to the ceiling : Facebook quite happily change the API on the live site without telling anyone which breaks things. Go on.. how many times have you seen the “Oops, something seems to have gone wrong” message? Well developers get that too – or rather they get calls that suddenly return no data, or incorrect and incomplete data, or error codes they’ve never seen before.

People file bug reports and Facebook go and change the documentation and then deny its an error. Or Facebook fix the bug and everything is fine for a few weeks then it re-occurs which suggests a lack of a proper test and release process. The worst one I’ve seen is a bug which apparently “fixed” itself with Facebook representatives saying they did not know what had caused the problem or why it was now working again. The PHP files they provide don’t even have version IDs in them so you can’t tell if you’ve got the latest version, or worse still : you can’t determine the version of the files that another WordPress plugin might have installed – so your code doesn’t work because the version of the Facebook files they have installed doesn’t have the function, or class, you need for your code to work.

So any way, along comes F8 and a whole new way of interfacing with Facebook : The Graph API, and along with that came a new data model and a new data permissions dialogue, and a new Data policy. Everything new and shiny and the statement that “On June 1, 2010, we’ll automatically transition all Facebook Platform applications and websites who have not yet migrated.”

Sounds good doesn’t it. Apart from the fact that no-one at Facebook has explained how you can use the new Data permissions dialogue with the “old” API, and everything I’ve tried simply comes back with meaningless errors, and from what I’ve read other developers have experienced the same problems.

So I guess I could just convert my application over to the new API couldn’t I, that would make things easier wouldn’t it? Ahhh…………..actually I can’t because Facebook haven’t actually written the PHP API libraries yet – well not to the point of supporting “offline” access, which is what my application relies on. Actually that last bit says a lot about Facebook : They announce a whole new API and a whole new data structure, but the only way to access it is hand crafting your own CURL statements and running a “live” Facebook session. Talk about the right hand not knowing what the left is doing….

Madness

I’d been using the Wordbook app for quite a bit but I’d always found that it lacked some features that I liked. I’ve now added these functions and got it doing things how I’d like.

So rather than keep cluttering up the original wordbook application page I’ve forked by code off totally.

I created a new Facebook application called Wordbooker and then created a new plugin called Wordbooker in the WordPress Extensions site.

Upgrading from the Forked Version.

As this is basically a new application its a bit messy as doing a normal removal of the old forked version will remove any record of posts/comments made with the forked version.

If you wish to retain that history then you need to back up the existing wordbook_postcomments table BEFORE you remove the forked version of wordbook.

Go into the options page for Wordbook and reset the configuration for wordbook

From the plugins page de-activate the wordbook plugin.

Delete the wordbook directory from wp-content/plugins

Upload the wordbooker directory into the wp-content/plugins directory

Go into the Plugins page and enable Wordbooker.

Go to the options page for Wordbooker and  it will ask you to get a login key from Facebook and then ask you to grant two extra permissions needed by Wordbooker – these allow Wordbooker to publish to your wall and also to fetch comments from it.

Click on the Save Configuration button.

You can then set up the various options on the option screen:

Wordbooker Options page

** Multiple Facebook account / WordPress account support **

If you as the blog owner only want it so that WP posts go to your FB account then go into the Options screen and set the default account to be yours, and that should be it, any person using a different WP account to post to your blog will publish those stories to your FB account.

But what if you’ve got a Family WB where different people would like to post to WP and to their OWN FB accounts. Simply get each of them to login to WP as themselves and configure WB as if they were the only user. Then when all of them have done this go back in as yourself and set the Default account to be you.

On the Edit Post page there is a WordBook Options block which includes a drop down list of the blog you wish to post to, if you want to post to your default blog then you don’t need to touch this but if someone wants to post that post to their FB account all they need to do is pick their name from the drop down list before they post.

** Length of Extract **
This allows you to change the length of the extract posted to Facebook. The minimum value is 200 and the maximum is 400 (at the moment) with the default being 256 characters. The extract will be trimmed to the nearest full word BELOW this value.

** Default Publish Post to Facebook **

This allows you to choose if posts should automatically be posted to Facebook. This option can be overridden from the Edit Post page

** Post Attribute **

This allows you to change the attribute line when posts are sent to Facebook. By default this is set to “Posted a new post on their blog”. This option can be overridden from the Edit Post page.

** Republish Post if edited more than x days ago **

This allows you to control how long it should be before Wordbook considers an edited post to be a “new” post and re-publishes it to Facebook.

** Override Re-Publication window  **

This allows to to force all edits to be reposted to Facebook ignoring the republish window. This option can be overridden from the Edit Post page.

** Update Facebook Status **
If this option is checked then the title of your blog post and its permalink will be posted to your status, along with the text specified here. This can be overridden from the Edit Post page. NOTE: If this option is Selected then your status is ALWAYS updated, even if you choose NOT to publish your post to Facebook.

** Import Comments from Facebook for Wordbook Posts  **

This version of Wordbook supports the importing of comments made on Facebook back into your WordPress blog. This allows you to set the default behaviour. This option can be overridden from the Edit Post page

** Auto Approve imported comments **

If you trust your friends on Facebook then you’re probably quite happy for their comments to automatically get posted as comments on your WordPress blog. If this option is not set then any imported comments are held in the moderation queue.

Once you’ve got the options set how you want then save them.

If you exported the wordbook_postcomments table before upgrading then you can now import it back into the database.

There may be times when you you are posting a blog entry and you’d like to do something differently, like NOT publish a post, or change your choice on what you do with comment. So on the Add New and Edit posts page you should now find a Wordbooker Options Override block where you can override several defaults:

Wordbooker Post options

If you are the administrator of a Facebook Fan page then you’ll also be given the option of posting to that page instead of posting to your own wall. At the moment there is a bug in the API which means that posts made to Fan Pages are shown as YOU posting on the Fan Page wall – rather than it looking like the Fan Page has posted the post directly.

PROBLEMS

If you’ve got problems its probably best to post them on the Wordbooker Page on Facebook where people can create new threads for each bug/problem and people can easily see if any fixes have been made