TWACEPOST

Post your wordpress content automatically to your facebook wall

Recently we needed to hookup a wordpress blog to facebook. There was a plugin for Wordpress that would do this but it seems to have broken recently so I've created this from scratch to make use of the new Facebook Graph API. You'll need to add a new application and allow that access to your chosen facebook account.

This is an early version (we're talking 0.2 here!). For now it will post to your wall for every update/published post. I expect to add some sort of checkbox to the post interface to toggle this on a per-post basis.

Requirements

This plugin makes use of cURL, which is often installed and activated on even shared hosting. As long as you can run wordpress you can probably run this. It has been tested with Wordpress 3.0.1 but should work with the >2.7 branch also.

For the configuration, you'll need:

* A Facebook application
* A Twitter application
* Bit.ly API key

You also need the twitter-async library from Jaisen Mathai to handle the Twitter oAuth stuff. I have this within a folder called lib. I haven't checked that in here, you'll need to grab that separately.

Installation

1. Grab the Epi*.php files from the twitter-async project
2. Place the files in a folder called lib
3. Copy the wp-twacepost folder to your wordpress plugins directory
4. Activate the plugin
5. Register a new application on facebook & twitter for your blog
6. Update the settings with the token, key & secrets for both

Getting an access token for a Facebook Profile

You'll need to first register a new application. We'll use this app to associate an access token which has authorization to post to your wall. In the URL below replace {APP_ID} with the application ID and {WP_URL} with your blog's URL.

https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/authorize?type=user_agent
&client_id={APP_ID}&redirect_uri=http%3A%2F%2F{WP_URL}
&scope=publish_stream,offline_access

By requesting "offline_access" we should only need to do this the once. If facebook is happy it will redirect you to your blog. In the URL query string you'll see "access_token=XXX". Copy that and update Twacepost's settings.

Now when you save/update a post it should automatically post to your wall complete with permalink and your blog name.

Getting an access token for a Facebook Page

If you want to use this plugin to push content to a page you are an admin for then you'll need to add "manage_pages" to the authorization url above. Facebook will then tell you that your newly registered application is requesting the ability to manage and publish to any pages.

Now, using the access token from the bit above you'll need to request your page access token by going to http://graph.facebook.com/me/accounts/?access_token={XXX} rememebering to replace {XXX} with your token. You should get a JSON response sort of like:

{
"data": [
    {
        "name": "My Lovely Facebook Page",
        "category": "Cool Pages That Rock My World",
        "id": "12345678",
        "access_token": "123456ABCDEF654321FEDCBA"
    }
]
}

Use the access token listed in there and then when saving posts wordpress will push it to your page and not your account.

Getting an access token for Twitter

The consumer keys you get when you've registered a new app, they'll be listed on the page for the your application data. To get an access token go to the dev site on twitter for apps. Click through to your newly created app and on the right hand side there's a section for My access token. If you click through there you'll see the token & secret that you'll need.

Getting an API key from Bit.ly

This one is very easy - just register a new account at bit.ly and then make your way to the account section, you'll see your API key in one of the blocks of information.