Yangtheman

Life hacker

Posts Tagged facebook

How to integrate Facebook Feed with a Rails app

Sep 9

Posted by Yang Chung in Ruby on Rails | 1 Comment

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*} 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

Read the rest of this entry »

Post to Twitter

Tags: , ,

How to integrate Facebook Connect with a Rails app

Aug 23

Posted by Yang Chung in Playground, Ruby on Rails, technology | 22 Comments

Top of my to-do list was to integrate Facebook Connect with my Rails app, since 1) there are A LOT of people using Facebook and 2) having to register to post or edit could be an obstacle in getting more users to use my site.

I looked on the web for a while, and found a great example by Stuart Eccles at Made by Many. It’s an awesome tutorial, but it’s for restful_authentication. I don’t use it, so I had to modify it a little bit. Also, I added a step to ask a user to pick a username. So the following instruction is basically modification of Stuart’s.

Without further ado, let’s begin.

1. Setup Facebook Application page

1.1. Go to this page, and enter a name for your application. I named mine “Playgrounds_R_Us”.

1.2. Make a note of Application ID, API Key, and Secret. You need it for facebooker.yml later.

1.3. Next is Authentication section. Here what’s important is Post-Authroize and Post-Remove Callback URL. They refer to a web page a user will be taken to after logging into and logging out of Facebook account. While testing, I left it at “http://127.0.0.1:3000″.

1.4. I also used the same URL (http://127.0.0.1:3000) for Canvas Callback URL in Canvas section and Connect URL in Connect section.

1.5. Then you are pretty much set with configuration on Facebook side.

2. Get facebooker plugin and install it. From your rails app root directory,

ruby script/plugin install git://github.com/mmangino/facebooker.git

Read the rest of this entry »

Post to Twitter

Tags: , , ,