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I’m proud to say that we’ve finally implemented Facebook Connect. It has been weeks in the making and without the help of Josh Elman and Adam Hupp over at Facebook this wouldn’t have been done this week! For now all that I’ve implemented is an easy way to comment on posts but in the coming weeks I’m going to be rolling out a large number of new features that build directly on top of Adam’s plugin.
I’d also like to share a few lessons learned that I gained from the process which included me pulling out my hair a few times (thankfully it’s still growing back). Currently I run wp-super-cache on this site. For those unaware of what wp-super-cache is, it is essentially a tool which makes it easy for sites to handle a heavy amount of traffic. A side effect of this plugin is that pages remain cached for at least an hour.
The end result is that it occasionally appears as though you are still logged in when you really aren’t. So how did I resolve the issue? I haven’t. I decided to cave in and rather than developing my own complex community platform (no not like Facebook), I’m integrating everything directly into Wordpress. While it doesn’t completely resolve the wp-super-cache issue, it makes things much more manageable.
If you are looking to find a wp-super-cache workaround for implementing Facebook Connect on your blog, good luck! Honestly, it’s probably not worth the effort. I also hope that all people that decide to log into this site stay logged in forever 
. The real key for me was having a single user database for managing this site’s community and Wordpress satisfied that requirement. While I’d like to integrate some of the features I’m working on into other sites, I’m going to hold off on a launching a unified user database.
O.k. enough of my jabbering about programming this site. The real story here is that we are live with Facebook Connect and I’m proud to have joined the more than 100 other sites that have implemented the Facebook Connect service. I’m expecting that we’ll see this trend continue over the coming weeks as sites implement the new Facebook Connect wordpress plugin (found here) as well as other plugins like Disqus and JS-Kit.
If you add Connect to your site please be sure to let us know. Also don’t hesitate to let us know about any bugs or issues you see in the new features we’ve already launched and will continue to launch over the coming weeks!
Cool, it works. This is my first usage of Facebook Connect.
For some reason I can’t get it to work. I clicked on your facebook connect button, entered in my credentials which just reloaded this page with the Facebook Connect button still there. Any thoughts?
ha, ok, it didn’t show me logged in until I posted. It seems a little unclear though. I still had to enter my name, email and web address after I clicked the connect button.
Glad it worked for you Matt … looks like there still may be a few issues from wp-super-cache. Going to look into this now.
Hi Norm,
I’m working on resolving that issue immeidately.
Hi Nick, I’m testing this out. Nice work implementing it.
Ah hah! That’s fantastic. Though like Norm, I had to comment before it synched.
Nice!
Well done Nick
Hi Nick,
We are in the process of resolving that right now and should be fixed momentarily. I’ve had a few bugs to fix this morning but everything should be working smoothly in the next 30 min - hour.
Thanks for checking in!
Seemed to work for me. To get around the cache issue, have you considered rebuilding the form submission portion of each post to be within an ‘iframe’ that is outside of wordpress hiearchy of files (so it won’t get cached)? Or, put it within the hiearchy and put some cache-busting (like timestamp) string at the end of the iframe src tag. I’m just conjecturing… I haven’t tried it.
Hi Joseph,
Thanks for commenting … I think we’ve actually figured out a solution and I’m setting it up on my staging server right now to test it out. Should be resolved momentarily. I’ll be writing a post about how to get around the wp-super-cache issue momentarily.
Best,
Nick
Hi Nick,
Nice integration ! We’ve also added Facebook Connect on our French blog applications-facebook.com, but we have to improve integration (like adding photo in comments like you).
We’ll see if we get more comments
Greetings - just trying out your Facebook Connect implementation. I might tackle the project this afternoon. Godspeed
Good job !
This is great, nice setup!
Great! It works like a charm. I did have problems with WP-Super-Cache and Facebook Connect plugin for wordpress too.
Good start - Great to see on my favorite fb news site and see it more around places. Now both Facebook fan(news) sites has it (Other being Justin = Inside Facebook)
One problem with these Wordpress plugins is if you got safe mode or a host that blocked (common free hosts) fopen/ and other external php it not work (Oxyhost and other hosts i been encouraging to see if they MIGHT put api.facebook.com, myspace, openid and live id on an greenlist or open it up some bit
as me with a Wordpress blog have ’security’ errors galore *sad*
Some suggestive ideas :):
the submit query button might be better as ’submit’ or ’send’ but is understandable however Query can suggest a search might be preformed :).
*idea* ‘Welcome to AllFacebook Forename [Jamie]!’ is even more welcome custom message and gives personal feel.
Buggy: hoverover avatar ‘invaid user’ - i assume this will be in a future update user profile picture (if public that is)
well i feel stupid your FB Connect development has the last 2 of my above (AFTER i make a post) BUT as a new user they were not there initally before i made a post (maybe that is a ‘Welcome New User’ bug and idea #2 and #3 appears afterwards first time or it happened to be a short service outage.
either way i bet someone may say ‘it has it already’ comment so i get my word in before anyone does Nick.
Glad you got it working. Time to get it working on my site…
cool
test comment on allfacebook and publish story at facebook
Nice job guys!
Test
pls add me as a friend and i might acepted
what test about girlss is it