On Monday, I’ve gotten Facebook Feed publishing to work with my site, and it took about two hours including TV watching time. I could’ve done it faster if I actually paid a full attention. It was all possible, thanks to Chris Schmitt, who has an excellent tutorial on his site.
1. Simply you first need to create a sub-class inherited from Facebooker::Rails::Publisher inside a controller. In my case, I wanted to publish a feed when a new playground is added and an existing playground is edited, so it made a sense to put it in playgrounds controller. publish_pg takes objects and sets parameters, and publish_pg_template creates a feed message based on those parameters.
class PlaygroundsController < ApplicationController [SNIP - other actions] class FacebookPublisher < Facebooker::Rails::Publisher def publish_pg_template one_line_story_template "{*actor*} created/updated: {*pg_name*}" short_story_template "{*actor*} created/updated: <a href='http://www.playgroundrus.com/playgrounds/{*pg_id*}'>{*pg_name*}</a> in {*pg_city*}, {*pg_state*}", "Check out what {*actor*} said, and rate or add comments to help other parents!" end def publish_pg(pg, facebook_session) send_as :user_action from facebook_session.user data :actor => facebook_session.user.first_name, :pg_name => pg.name, :pg_city => pg.city, :pg_state => pg.state, :pg_id => pg.id end end end
2. Then you need to create database to store templates. You can follow Chris’ example exactly.
class CreateFacebookTemplates < ActiveRecord::Migration def self.up create_table :facebook_templates, :force => true do |t| t.string :template_name, :null => false t.string :content_hash, :null => false t.string :bundle_id, :null => true end add_index :facebook_templates, :template_name, :unique => true end def self.down remove_index :facebook_templates, :template_name drop_table :facebook_templates end end
3. Finally you need to call the method, and you can do so by putting create in front, as Chris explains. In create action, I first check if logged-in user is a FB user, since if it’s called without existing facebook_session, it will barf. I have the similar check and call in update action for when a playground is edited.
def create [SNIP] if @playground.save if @current_user.facebook_user? flash[:user_action_to_publish] = FacebookPublisher.create_publish_pg(@playground, session[:facebook_session]) end redirect_to playground_path(@playground) else render :action => "new" end end
Oh, and also, don’t forget to add the following between <header></header> tags in app/views/layouts/application.html.erb so that FB Feed window pops up after create or update action.
<%= fb_connect_javascript_tag %> <% init_fb_connect "XFBML","Api" do %> <%= fb_user_action(flash[:user_action_to_publish]) if flash[:user_action_to_publish] %> <% end %>
Happy integration!
