http://fab-ee.com/blog fabEE - Integrate Facebook Connect with your ExpressionEngine site en greg@purple-dogfish.co.uk Copyright 2009 2009-12-24T14:51:40+00:00 http://fab-ee.com/blog/fabee-is-available/ http://fab-ee.com/blog/fabee-is-available/#When:14:51:40Z Following on from our post yesterday, we’re happy to announce that fabEE for ExpressionEngine 1.x is now available. Check out the documentation or go right ahead and get it from the Purple Dogfish Store. Have a very happy holiday everyone! 2009-12-24T14:51:40+00:00 http://fab-ee.com/blog/fabee-is-ready/ http://fab-ee.com/blog/fabee-is-ready/#When:19:14:39Z Welcome back! This blog post title says it all really, fabEE for ExpressionEngine 1.x is finally ready. We’re just sorting out the store and dealing with some last minute details. So, what’s been happening? Well, we’ve rewritten fabEE again (pretty much from scratch). This was due to the significant changes within Facebook in the past few months. The most obvious change is the way the publishing to Facebook now works; it uses the new(ish) Stream Publish method that now makes the whole process more straightforward. This method will also update a commenter’s Facebook status as well as post the content (as well as a link back) to their stream. This also means that your users now have to give specific permission to both receive email from your fabEE site as well as permission to post back to their stream – you’ll notice a little permission status under your login if you connect to this site using Facebook. The other significant change is that fabEE is now just an extension, there is no module component. fabEE is now a development platform. For those who wish to build upon it there is a PHP global object that can be used to call any of the appropriate Facebook Platform or Connect methods. In addition there are two extension hooks that you can use to fundamentally change the way that fabEE works when a Facebook user authorises or deauthorises your site. In the download package is an example plugin that shows you how to use the global object. The plugin will list all of a Facebook user’s friends who are also members of your site. We’ve been running a closed beta for a while and we now think it’s pretty stable. However, since there are a multitude of variables (browsers, browser extensions, EE extensions, template setups) that could affect its operation, we fully expect that there might be a few teething problems. Support for fabEE will be either via email or via Get Satisfaction. And finally, we’ve fixed the price for fabEE 1.x at $59.95. 2009-12-23T19:14:39+00:00 http://fab-ee.com/blog/we-are-now-fully-fabeed-up-and-other-news/ http://fab-ee.com/blog/we-are-now-fully-fabeed-up-and-other-news/#When:20:09:44Z First things first, apologies for the lack of updates. We have not been able to devote much time to fabEE development over the last few months. However, we definitely haven’t given up and progress, albeit slow, is being made. To that end this site is now fabEE’d up for blog commenting. You should be able to sign in with your Facebook credentials and if you do you should have the option to cross post your comment (with additional commentary) to your Facebook stream (not just your wall as was the case with the test we did in April). If you helped out with the data test we did in April you may remember that fabEE was pretty slow really. We’ve refactored a lot of stuff and done a lot of testing against the Facebook API – some of which is rather depressing. Anyway, we’ve significantly reduced the overhead before being able to render the template with fabEE user data. Hopefully this will make it more usable. In other news we’ve had time to sit down and think about what we are going to do with fabEE in the EE 1.6 branch and EE2.0. We have decided that further feature development on the 1.6 branch version of fabEE will effectively cease. We will still release it but it will be at a reduced cost since it will be limited to blog commenting and will not interface properly with the forum module or the member templates. This is because there are too many significant obstacles to overcome to make it cost effective for us to work on and make it easy enough to install and maintain for non-developers. So, apart from final tweaks and documentation and then the inevitable bug-fixing we shall be concentrating all our efforts on EE2.0 when it is released. Lastly, we finally got around to sorting out an RSS feed! 2009-08-31T20:09:44+00:00 http://fab-ee.com/blog/thanks-for-your-help/ http://fab-ee.com/blog/thanks-for-your-help/#When:09:09:06Z Thanks to everyone who helped out on the test blog. We’ve identified a few issues that need some work and are sorting them out as quickly as time allows. 2009-04-07T09:09:06+00:00 http://fab-ee.com/blog/we-need-your-help/ http://fab-ee.com/blog/we-need-your-help/#When:20:12:48Z We’ve reached the point where we need some real world usage and data to finish the test of the fabEE structure. Therefore, we’re inviting you to help us by going to our test template and logging in using Facebook Connect. You’ll be able to either comment on an existing article or submit new blog entries using the standard EE SAEF. At the moment there is only a single feed template registered and that is for commenting – you won’t get the opportunity to notify Facebook that you’ve submitted a new blog post. One thing that probably needs clarification is that the Connect feed update is not the same as the status updates that appear on your Facebook wall. Now, we fully expect that this won’t work properly for all of you – fabEE is not finished, there are undoubtably odd bugs and this is definitely not a public beta – it is so that we can gather real world usage data and complete the work in the backend. The test template may be removed or reset and its associated data deleted at any time. Please do email us or post a comment with any feedback about the way that fabEE is supposed to work. Thanks for helping out. 2009-03-22T20:12:48+00:00 http://fab-ee.com/blog/fabee-development-progress/ http://fab-ee.com/blog/fabee-development-progress/#When:17:08:22Z Firstly, thanks to everybody who has shown interest in fabEE. I realise we’ve been a bit quiet recently but rest assured that development is proceeding smoothly. Much of what we’ve been doing recently is making sure that fabEE usage would not breach the Facebook Connect TOS. The most important of which is that user data cannot be cached for more than 24 hours. If you’d rather we shift the burden of these checks onto the webmaster (through some CP side data refresh method) then let us know. We’d be keen to hear what you think. What have we done so far? Well, a lot. Our test system currently does this: One click login using Facebook credentials A new fabEE user is checked to see whether they’ve logged in before. If not, then a member account is created for them and some basic user information including profile picture is stored as the user avatar and profile picture The member group that the fabEE user has joined is exactly like any other EE member group The CP member data and profiles are changed appropriately depending upon whether the user is a fabEE one Data is now flagged when it needs re-caching Much of the current work is in the user-side member templates – we’re providing a set of theme files for you to use – and in some session management detail. We’ve got the list of features/integration requirements that we want to complete before beta testing and work will continue on those things. Oh, we’ve been asked what the exact requirements will be for using fabEE. Outside of a Facebook account, all you’ll need is a recent-ish version of EE (probably 1.5.2 but to be confirmed) and a server running PHP5. This is because of the official Facebook API. We’ll look at making it work with PHP4 at a later date. 2009-02-14T17:08:22+00:00