[Plugin: Simple Facebook Connect] help needed with the modules

Another problem:

This module: SFC – Share Button

adds the following html and messes up my SEO strategy;

<meta name="title" content="Home" />
<meta name="description" content="" />
<meta name="medium" content="blog" />

Publish: Automatic publishing (instead of manual) is something I’ve been working on, but which has proven tricky. I’m thinking of just having the popup automatically appear after you click Publish and the page reloads. So it’ll still be manual in that you have to click a button after publishing. A fully automatic version is possible, but would need the FB PHP library, which I don’t fully understand how to use quite yet. Soon.

Comments: To use, read the readme.txt file. You need to make some minor theme modifications.

Fan Box Widget: Applications are better than the normal “Fan Pages”, but have many of the same features. I don’t use nor recommend groups, they don’t have any particular value. Anyway, the reason you want fans is that it’s like a way to subscribe. When you publish your content to the Application Page, the Fans receive those as Updates.

Connect Widget: All it does is add a FB-Connect login button. Nothing more. This is just another way to let them connect to your site. Other plugins, such as the comments plugin, will recognize the logged in user and act accordingly.

Live Stream Widget: Creates a Live Stream box. More info: https://mashable.com/2009/06/24/facebook-live-stream-box/

Bookmark Widget: No way to tell whether the app is bookmarked or not in order to hide the title. I recommend leaving the title blank to eliminate it entirely.

Share Button: If you want to make it only on certain places, I recommend modifying your theme for now and using the manual insertion mode. See the readme.txt.

Meta: The content should contain an excerpt of your post’s content. If it’s blank, then perhaps you have another plugin interfering. However, this cannot be easily removed, Facebook uses these meta fields to determine how the share works and such. I didn’t consider removing it from the Front Page when it’s a Page, I might add that.

Thanks a lot ??

Keep an eye on the module with the meta, it took me a couple of hours to figure out where it came from…

I’m having an issue with the comments. I click on the connect with facebook icon. If i’m not logged in it asks for my email and password. Then it kit’s me to the same page but in the little fb connect window not the parent window. I’m i’m logged into facebook pops open a little window.

I’m probably missing something.

Mark

This meta description is mess up my page.
Because, i have a phpfreechat on my page, also the bannergarden plugin.

So, when i use schortcode in my page, like [phpfreechat] then it adds to the description. Ok, but unfortunatly the shortcode processor process these shortcodes…. You should fix this, maybe escape the shortcodes…

If you have a problem with some other plugin, you should probably fix that plugin.

SFC Share does indeed use the meta description field. If you have another plugin messing with that field, then deactivate that other plugin. SFC Share has to use the description, it’s the only way for it to work properly.

@otto42:

I need to come back to the meta description issue. I use AIO SEO for my meta description and keywords but on every page where the share button appears, it inserts a second meta description which is extremely undesirable.

can this be made optionally somehow? Or maybe make your plugin detect some of the major SEO plugins and then skip this step?

IMO, you should just stop using those plugins. They’re fairly useless.

But, if you really want to roll your own, add this to your theme’s functions.php:

remove_action('wp_head','sfc_share_meta');

Note: Lack of this meta data will break the Facebook Share functionality.
You’ll have to add your own meta data to compensate for this.

thx. I trust my self composed description/keywords more than the auto generated ones.
I know the meta data isn’t that relevant anymore for search engines but still…

Share doesn’t do keywords. But the description is what appears in the Share button box, so you ideally want it to say the first few words of the actual article, in order to get people to click on the link and come back to your site. That’s sorta the whole point of sharing, to drive traffic back to your site.

or as I do, prefer it to show a short handcrafted excerpt ??

thanks works brilliantly!

Applications are better than the normal “Fan Pages”

Why exactly?

It’s important because I created another Fan Page where I tried to add this application while I was trying to figure out a way to get this content posted to a group we already have, but it’s no use.

I did notice though that after I specified this Fan Page in SFC settings, the automated posting became possible (due to the nature of the bug preventing application to post to its own profile AFAIU) and a few other things I found handy in widgets but already forgot.

However, since I didn’t start using this Fan Page or application heavily yet (or promote either on Facebook), I want to determine pros and cons of using either. So far I didn’t see any pros in using the app for a naked eye. Now if it could post its updates to a group stream… but that’s another issue.

Because Applications have all the attributes of Fan Pages… and more. Simple, really. Fan Pages don’t have any advantages over Applications. The only reason I support them is because often people will already have Fan Pages set up and they don’t want to give them up.

However, Groups are another thing entirely. SFC doesn’t support groups yet.

SFC 1.0, BTW, can post automatically to either Fan Page or Applications. It works around the bug you mention.

But what are those advantages?

I don’t see it handy to give an application page for people to follow our updates just because it sounds wrong and also because application should be supposed to do something more than serve as a wall for updates, IMO… Like being able to be added and serve those updates to groups or personal profiles, for example… Then it could be really handy to have an application with configurable options instead of a wall of our updates.

This could be a promising way to develop the plugin to have it more integrated with WP blogs.

And it this ever happens, is it safe to use that application like a fan page e.g. add other applications to it like RSS Graffiti to also post there say Twitter updates of our project (they are different), have people post on its wall and such? I.e. use as a normal Fan Page. And what if Facebook decides to remove that possibility in the future? The purpose of the two ARE different normally…

That’s sorta my point. There’s nothing *preventing* you from using the Canvas Application type of functionality as well. It’s like a Fan Page that has the potential to be more than a Fan Page.