Going the Easy Way with Social Plugins
Social plugins are a nice, easy way to build a Facebook-integrated Web site on the fly with little effort by anyone who can do a simple copy and paste. In the past, Facebook provided Facebook Markup Language (FBML), a tag language giving shortcuts to things like comment boxes and simple nav bar structures and other shortcuts in your code. Social plugins are Facebook's next evolution in this, moving from FBML to simple HTML iFrames; you can copy and paste these little pieces of Facebook into any HTML document on or off Facebook.com
Understanding social plugins
Before you start working with social plugins, go to http://developers.facebook.com/plugins and look at the various plugins that Facebook has available.(See Figure 6-1.) By the time you read this, you will probably find many more than those I mention here.
The best way to convince you that social plugins are valuable is by working with them directly, right on Facebook itself. If you do anything in this chapter, I want you to try this exercise, and I promise that you'll see the benefit of integrating Facebook on your site almost immediately!
Figure 6-1: Facebook offers a range of social plugins that you can choose from.
To see the full potential of social plugins, follow these steps:
- Go to http://developers.facebook.com/plugins.
- Click the Activity Feed plugin.
On the following page, you'll ...
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