Most WordPress developers know you can use one of several plugins to publish from WordPress to a Facebook wall, app or fan page. Did you know you can also do the opposite? You can publish from Facebook to WordPress by using the FeedWordPress plugin and the RSS feed from your fan page. This can be handy for clients who want to keep their site updated with blog posts, or share links and information, but don’t necessarily want to spend the time to post with WordPress.
Let’s face it, Facebook is convenient to use to share a link, upload small photos and video, or write a brief update.
Your Blog is Hungry
FeedWordPress is a plugin that pulls content from an RSS feed and publishes articles as WordPress posts. It is somewhat complex to set up properly, so I won’t go into that here. It’s up to you to figure it out, but it is very useful for adding non-copyright or permitted content to your site or a client’s site. For instance, I use it to publish bicycle manufacturer’s RSS feeds to a local bike shop’s WordPress site. You can also use it to create a scraper site, but you wouldn’t do that, would you?
Connect WordPress to Facebook
Using the plugin Simple Facebook Connect, your client can publish WordPress posts to a Facebook fan page. I suggest you install Simple Facebook Connect and learn how to set up a simple Facebook App using the plugin’s easy instructions. This will allow your website to use Facebook authentication to Publish to Facebook, allow comments by logged in Facebook users, etc.
Creating an App instead of a Fan Page or Business page may suit your needs. Give it a try if you have not already set up a Facebook Page. If you use SFC, don’t set it to automatically publish to Facebook, or you may create a publishing loop. Leave it set to manual publishing and you’ll have an extra Publish button in the post editor for that purpose.
Setting up the Facebook RSS Feed
If your client would like to use Facebook’s simple, highly available, multi-device platform to publish content to a WordPress website, you will need a Facebook page or app’s RSS feed.
Facebook Fan Pages or Business Pages are for groups or businesses. If you build websites, you have probably set these up for several clients already. But to make the RSS feed from the page available to RSS readers and aggregators, you must change a few settings:
- Edit Page > Manage Permissions
- Uncheck Only Admins can See Page
- Age Restrictions: None
- Country Restrictions: None
Uncheck All:
- Users can write or post content on the wall
- Users can add photos
- Users can add tags to photos
- Users can add videos
This will make your wall posts available to the general public, because users with restricted privacy settings cannot post to your wall (they can still comment on your posts).
Now you can click the Subscribe by RSS link on your page, and the RSS feed will not display the dreaded “Facebook Syndication Error”:
You probably reached this page by entering the guide of a syndicated error message into the location bar of your browser. This probably means that you can’t see the feed that you were trying to access. This is probably because the owner of the feed changed his or her privacy settings or deleted content on the feed. You may be able to get access to the feed by contacting the owner of the content being syndicated in that feed.
You will get a RSS URL: http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=195534004499&format=rss20
If your feed’s language needs to be adjusted, for instance if your site is hosted in Netherlands but your audience is in U.S., you will need to add a locale parameter to the feed URL: http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=195534004499&format=rss20&locale-en_US
Try it in Firefox or NetNewsWire or any RSS Reader to see if you get a valid feed. If you see Facebook Syndication Error, then go back and edit your page’s permissions (see above).
If your site is hosted in a locale different from the locale of your Facebook page (e.g. your host is located in Europe, but your Facebook page is for North America), then you should use the resolved IP address for Facebook for your locale. You can find this IP address from a terminal window with the ping command. Otherwise, Facebook.com will resolve to the IP address and language for your host server. This causes synchronization issues and may cause a sync timeout which can block your pages from loading.
FeedWordPress Syndication
OK, now you have a valid feed. Add it to FeedWordPress. The settings you may wish to change:
Posts & Links >
- Permalinks point to: The local copy on this website
- Relative URIs: leave relative URIs unresolved
- Formatting filters: Expose syndicated posts to formatting filters
Now, you should have a valid RSS feed and a properly configured Syndication system.Log in to Facebook and go to the app or page (easy way is to type the name into Facebook search bar at top).Share a Link, paste the URL of the page you want to feature, e.g. http://www.extremevisionhomes.com/
Edit the fields in the Link content by clicking on them. Or, you can upload a photo or video. But be sure to add a tagline to “Say something about this…” This line becomes your Title in the RSS feed or WordPress post. Otherwise you will see a generic “Your Client’s Facebook Wall 07/12/2011 15:35:43″ as the title.
And on the client’s site, you will see this:
You may want to set up a WordPress Category for these posts. FeedWordPress can be configured to post to a specific Category, add Tags, etc. You might even separate these posts from the main blog page, or style them in your WordPress theme via CSS or a Category Template.
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