Facebook® Application Development For Dummies®

Integrating Your Own Application into a Facebook Page through Tabs

Tabs, which are now links on the left side of a Facebook Page, are a way you can integrate your application into a brand's presence on Facebook. I show you how to build a simple custom tab in Chapter 4. Setting up an application into a Facebook tab is as simple as creating that first application (refer to Chapter 2).

For consistency's sake, I call the little links on the left of your Facebook Page “tabs.” This is because as I started this book, those links actually were tabs, spanning across the top of each Facebook Page. However, they're now just links on the left side of the page. Facebook hasn't called these links anything else at the moment, so I'll just keep calling them tabs.

Setting up your custom tab

Just as with your first application, you need to set up where Facebook points to for your custom tab. The Custom Tab application works just the same — the user opens the tab and Facebook calls your server to get the code to display for the user (through an iFrame).

To set up your custom tab, follow these steps — these may be a bit of a repeat of Chapter 4 if you went through tab creation there:

1. Go toFacebook.com/developers, and go to your application's settings.

   If you haven't yet created an application, go back to Chapter 2 and create an application. (In this case, you really don't have to write any code ...