WPBook
So for a while I’ve been working on and beta testing the next version of WPBook. Tonight I’ve just tagged it for release, so it will be available for download shortly. (I’ve already been running it here for a while and testing it on a few other test blogs).
The main improvement in WPBook 1.5 is that it now knows how to use stream.publish, meaning that it will automatically post to your wall in Facebook when you publish a post in WordPress. Your friends should see that notification as well in their streams. (We’re not, however, sending application updates or tracking all users’ user id’s – instead you enter your own userid into the settings and it uses that to post to your wall). Included are attachments (first image attached to the post is used) and excerpts (if you hand craft excerpts they will be used in the wall post).
The other main improvement is that WPBook now requires PHP5, and as such can wrap Facebook calls in Try/Catch blocks. For the non-programmer, this means those awful, dramatic “fatal uncaught exception” error screens are gone. WPBook isn’t doing anything terribly meaningful with those errors yet – still working on that- but at least it traps them.
In this release:
- WPBook now requires PHP 5
- Enables user to post to stream, including to pages. (Must be pages for which you are the admin, to which you have added the app, and which have granted stream.publish permission – link provided in the admin to grant permissions.
- Catches exceptions thrown by the Facebook client. (Doesn’t yet surface those in good error messages, but at least they are caught)
- Fixed, I hope, issue with comments inside Facebook for some users
- Clean up of some admin styles (resized gravatar images as well as some basic hierarchy on options)
- Added Page Options as their own section
- Allow user to select pages to be excluded
- Added option to allow a menu of parent pages at top of the app below the title
- Fixed “Facebok” typo in line line 182 of theme/index.php
- Option to turn on and off page list under content (independent of menu)
- Option to turn on/off recent post under content
- Allow user to set the amount of recent post to show under content (default 10)
- Cleaned up custom header/footer now only one function instead of two (no reason to have two functions)
- Added %tag_links% and %category_links% to custom header footer as well as made archive pages work.
- Set smart default for when Blog Title isn’t set
Next steps?
- Better error handling code – do something with the messages Facebook returns when an exception is thrown
- User selectable theme directory – for users who’ve taken the time to customize their theme
- Threaded comments – likely means requiring WP 2.7, though for error handling (and just simplicity) I’m thinking of jumping right to WordPress 2.8
- Cross-Posting to a commenter’s wall when they comment inside Facebook. (Because it is in response to a user action, I understand they don’t even have to grant stream.publish permission).
What else would you like to see?
Update: Closing comments on this post. For troubleshooting please use the support forums instead.