The WordPress vs Facebook Game: Round II

You can make something work in theory, but reality can often have a different opinion. My plan to integrate WordPress with Facebook worked in theory (and the first tests) but in practice there were problems.

The weak link was Facebook’s feature that imports an RSS feed as your Notes. It is supposed to check the feed every couple of hours, but it simply doesn’t. The internets suggested that this isn’t something new and given that Notes isn’t high in the Facebook food chain, I doubt this will be resolved soon. The situation called for more research.

The answer came from the Wp-Fb Comments plugin. It uses Facebook’s Graph API to

  • publish WordPress posts on the Wall of a Facebook Page
  • import comments on Facebook to WordPress
  • copy comments from WordPress to the Facebook without requiring from the user to act (it is posted as a coment in the post on the Page Wall, not on the user’s stream).

All in all, this is working well, but seem to be two issues. One, and i’m not sure where this is coming from (the Wp-Fb Comments plugin or the Facebook Connect one), the user gets a popup with just a Facebook logo when he posts. Two, my new page has zero likes ;) but this isn’t something a little bit of social media marketing can’t solve…

My next target is to make this setup less dependent on Facebook, allowing people to comment without a Facebook account (and without forcing them to register on WordPress either). To be continued then…

Read also: Trying out the Livefyre commenting system and How to add Facebook / Twitter / etc authentication on WordPress

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