Integration with Facebook

Anybody every thought of attempting this?

[developers.facebook.com]

- Bob

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Robert Angle
Phorum lover, nothing more.
Ruminations

I have been experimenting with some of the facebook social plugins on my Phorum sandbox site. Stuff like "share" and "like", and also integrating facebook comments with Phorum topics. Most of my integration work for this was in the templates, because the facebook social plugins API is declarative. In my opinion, the best route towards a facebook social plugins integration would be a set of templates specifically designed for incorporating the desired facebook widgets into the layout.

-phil.

Since everybody is addicted to facebook these days, I was curious as to how hard it would be to integrate my forum powered by Phorum with Facebooks developer API's. Specifically, I would like people to be able to visit my site and log in via Facebook. But I also have strong security measures in place, as in new users must be referred by current users and their registration requires moderator approval. I would still want the ability to manually approve new users and to be able to ban thr troublemakers.

Adding the necessary FB code to templates would be easy enough. Figuring out exactly what code to add and where is much more difficult. I could probably make some headway in figuring it out, but not as fast as you seasoned programmers :-)

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Robert Angle
Phorum lover, nothing more.
Ruminations

I am not sure I understand what you mean by users visiting your side and logging in via facebook. Do you mean use FB single sign-on to replace your registration process, or do you mean you login your users through your Phorum powered app and then allow your application to directly interact with their facebook content (I think they call their API the "Graph API")? These are definitely two different scenarios. Either way, these approaches go through Modules, i.e., some PHP coding. Apparently none of the Phorum module developers has come across any use cases that make them want to write one of these kinds of modules. I looked at FB's APIs and examples, and I can see how it would be done, I just can't think of a compelling reason for this level of FB integration in the forum I run. Maybe one day I'll be bored and do it for the fun of it :)

If you just want to embellish a website with FB content, the easiest way is to use their social plug-in widgets, which are easy to incorporate into Phorum templates. Unless your goal is single sign-on, my advice is go this route first. [developers.facebook.com]

-phil.

What I would like to do is allow people to go through the normal registration and login, but also allow them the option to login using their facebook login and then posting, replying and such. I think this ability would drive a lot more traffic to my site. Anyone made any headway on this?