Auto-publishing to a Facebook Fan Page

The new 0.999 version does indeed auto-publish to Applications just fine. I’m using it for just that, in fact, on my own sites. The bug referenced only applies to the previous method, using the older Connect libraries. The latest version uses the Graph API instead and should have no problems.

So yes, it can auto-publish to application walls and Fan Pages without problems. However, there’s two bits you need to check.

First, make sure you’ve enabled it and granted the permissions using the button on the Settings page. Second, make sure you SAVE afterwards. Saving causes it to go to Facebook and get the relevant access tokens. The three lines underneath the permissions button will be green when the plugin has the proper tokens. If they’re not green, then it can’t publish.

If you can’t get them to turn green, then you may have a deeper underlying problem. One I encountered happened when a server didn’t have PHP configured with the OpenSSL libraries. Without the openssl libraries, the plugin was unable to talk to Facebook’s Graph API using https, which is required by the Graph API. If your server can’t make SSL connections, then very little of the automatic functionality will work.

Hi Otto, many thanks for the super speedy response.

I’m testing on my local environment (MAMP) and logged in to my personal Facebook account to administer my Facebook Fan page. Two SFC plugins are enabled – Publish & Comments. Under settings, ‘Automatically Publish to Facebook Fan Page’ is ticked, I’ve hit the ‘Grant SFC Permissions’ button and saved my changes. Unfortunately, only one of the three token checks turns green while ‘Application Access Token’ and ‘Fan Page Access Token’ remain unfound.

Would you guess this is indeed a problem with MAMP’s PHP/OpenSSL configuration or something more fundamental/silly on my part?

Thanks again.

Yes, most likely it’s a lack of ssl support. On a Windows XAMPP setup I’d check the PHP.INI file and make sure that extension=php_openssl.dll was uncommented. On a different platform you may need to recompile PHP with the openssl libraries.

Thanks Otto. I’ll start Googling re: MAMP and OpenSSL.

Back to a more basic question, with auto-publishing enabled, will every new post I create be automatically feed to my Fan Page when I hit ‘Publish’. I’m hoping to publish only selected posts to my Fan Page but pull back any Facebook generated comments to my WP site.

Yes, it pushes every new publicly available post at the time of Publishing.

I’m working on a method to allow manual publishing to store the right information for FB comments pull-back to work, but it’s buggy so I haven’t implemented it in the code yet. That’ll probably be a 1.1 thing.

Thanks for clarifying Otto – much appreciated. Will keep my eye out for the 1.1 version. Cheers again.