Hi there!<\/p>\n
A few days ago, I started to write my first own facebook application<\/strong>. It all went quite okay until one certain point: I wanted my application to update the profile box of the user, which uses the app at that single moment. And that wasn’t as easy, as I thought.<\/p>\n The problem was: after the profile box has been updated, all profile boxes of all users had the same content<\/strong> – the content of the user who last updated his profile box.<\/p>\n I will come to the solution later. First of all, a quick explanation of what I needed to do:<\/p>\n Here’s the code step-by-step <\/strong>(just put all sniplets together):<\/strong><\/p>\n Above:<\/strong> first of all, we need to include facebook’s PHP libraries<\/strong>, define several variables<\/strong> for our application, initialize our facebook object<\/strong> and retrieve the UID<\/strong> of the user who currently uses the application.<\/p>\n Above:<\/strong> we then define the content<\/strong> which we want to be displayed within the profile box<\/strong>. In this examble, it will be the name of the user, greeting the visitor.<\/p>\n Above:<\/strong> this is important<\/strong>! At this point, I got stuck for a while. The reason was, facebook caches<\/strong> profile boxes content until the application’s canvas page is requested for the next time. The handle is very important<\/strong> for that caching mechanism, since it has to be a unique identifier<\/strong> for each application and each user. For that reason, I simply use the prefix ‘pb_<\/strong>‘ followed by the applications ID<\/strong> (defined above) and the UID<\/strong> of the current user (also defined above)!<\/p>\n Above:<\/strong> the rest is quite simple. We make an API call<\/strong> to facebook and send our application key<\/strong>, the protocol version<\/strong>, the UID<\/strong> of the facebook user whose profile box ought to be updated and, of course, the content<\/strong> for that box. The content will be sent as the reference handle<\/strong> we defined earlier.<\/p>\n If you want to update multiple profile boxes with one single API call, I guess, this could work if you send an array containing the UIDs. If not, you can still get all those UIDs, walk through the array and perform multiple API calls. I read somewhere, some users had problem updating large numbers of profiles… Just give it a try.<\/p>\n Comments (if it worked for you or even if it didn’t) are appreciated \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n The example above is about updating content in a users profile, not<\/strong> about setting up a profile box on a profile. You should read the manual carefully.<\/p>\n A user has to approve a certain application to create a profile box. Therefore, you need to render a button<\/strong>, which sets up the box. You can easily do this by:<\/p>\n The last line renders the button, you want to have on your canvas page.<\/p>\n Good luck! Thomas<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hi there! A few days ago, I started to write my first own facebook application. It all went quite okay until one certain point: I wanted my application to update the profile box of the user, which uses the app at that single moment. And that wasn’t as easy, as I thought. The problem was: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[231,211,221,241,151],"class_list":["post-1601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","tag-api","tag-facebook","tag-fbml","tag-php","tag-programming"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thomasgericke.de\/v4\/interactive\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thomasgericke.de\/v4\/interactive\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thomasgericke.de\/v4\/interactive\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thomasgericke.de\/v4\/interactive\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thomasgericke.de\/v4\/interactive\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1601"}],"version-history":[{"count":46,"href":"https:\/\/www.thomasgericke.de\/v4\/interactive\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2081,"href":"https:\/\/www.thomasgericke.de\/v4\/interactive\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601\/revisions\/2081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thomasgericke.de\/v4\/interactive\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thomasgericke.de\/v4\/interactive\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thomasgericke.de\/v4\/interactive\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
Code sniplet #1<\/code><\/strong><\/p>\nrequire_once 'facebook-platform\/php\/facebook.php';\r\n\r\n$appid = 'xxxxxxxxxxxx';\r\n$appapikey = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx';\r\n$appsecret = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx';\r\n\r\n$facebook = new Facebook($appapikey, $appsecret);\r\n$user_id = $facebook->require_login();<\/pre>\n
Code sniplet #2<\/code><\/strong><\/p>\n$fb_box = "<H4 class='box_header clearfix'><span>";\r\n$fb_box .= "Hello World!";\r\n$fb_box .= "<\/span><\/H4>";\r\n$fb_box .= "<div>I am ";\r\n$fb_box .= "<fb:name uid=\\"$user_id\\" useyou=\\"false\\" \/>.";\r\n$fb_box .= "Nice you're on my page.<\/div>";\r\n$fb_box .= "Some more content in HTML or FBML...";<\/pre>\n
Code sniplet #3<\/code><\/strong><\/p>\n$fb_box_handle = 'pb_' . $appid . '_' . $user_id;<\/pre>\n
Code sniplet #4<\/code><\/strong><\/p>\n$facebook->api_client->call_method('facebook.profile.setFBML',\r\narray(\r\n'api_key' => $appapikey,\r\n'v' => '1.0',\r\n'uid' => $user_id,\r\n'profile' => '<fb:narrow><fb:ref handle="' . $fb_box_handle . '" \/><\/fb:narrow>',\r\n'profile_main' => '<fb:ref handle="' . $fb_box_handle . '" \/>',\r\n)\r\n);<\/pre>\nUPDATE because of comment #2:<\/code><\/p>\n$appapikey = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx';\r\n$appsecret = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx';\r\n$facebook = new Facebook($appapikey, $appsecret);\r\n$user_id = $facebook->require_login();\r\n$facebook->api_client->profile_setFBML($appapikey, $user_id, 'profile', NULL, 'mobile_profile', 'profile_main');\r\necho "<fb:add-section-button section='profile' \/>";<\/pre>\n