Carr Communications Inc.

Here is a rundown on the latest updates to Facebook Tab Manager. More explanation after the bullet points. I will be doing a webinar on the use of the plugin Thursday April 14, 2011 at 7 pm ET (www.anymeeting.com/davidfcarr), and a recording will be available if I can figure out how to push the right buttons.

Changes in version 2.6.2 2.6.4

• Added [fblike] shortcode as an alias to [fbtab nodecode="1"]. Recommended for situations where you are wrapping a block of text and image content inside a shortcode that indicates whether it should only be shown to people who have not yet liked, or who have liked your page. Example [fblike like="0"]CONTENT TO SHOW TO NEW VISITORS[/fblike] [fblike like="1"]FAN-ONLY CONTENT[/fblike]
• To display an existing page in the fbtab template, you can add the query string ?fb=tab to the end of the page url. You can also use resize=1 to invoke the resizing JavaScript. Example:http://www.carrcommunications.com/contact/davids-resume/?fb=tab&resize=1
• Update: version 2.6.4 also lets you set query parameters new=1 (links should open in a new window) head=1 (execute wp_head) and footer=1 (execute wp_footer). I think that’s about as fancy as I’d want to make it from options you can pass through the url, but I came across cases where these would be useful in my own experiments.
• Users who don’t like my template can now specify their own should be used instead. Only recommended for advanced users with their own plugin/template development skills.
• Better conformance with WordPress coding standards.

Here is the background. I originally set up the fbtab shortcode to cover a couple of different scenarios, one of which was a technique for including inline JavaScript like one of the snippets you might get from the Facebook Social Plugins page. The idea was to let users paste in the script snippet in the WordPress editor’s visual mode as if you were entering a code sample for display rather than execution. I’d then let the shortcode function decode any HTML entities transformations added by the editor.

The like=”0″ and like=”1″ attributes came later. It worked fine if what you wanted to include or exclude based on whether the visitor had liked your page was a JavaScript snippet or a blog listing generated using the query parameter. But what if you wanted to just include a block of content between the tags? You might have content that ought to be encoded as HTML entities, so the decode routine wouldn’t be appropriate for that and might cause problems. At some point, I added support for a decode=”0″ parameter to indicate the HTML decode should not be applied.

In an attempt to clean this up a little, I’ve added fblike as another shortcode tag you can use with all the same parameters, but it’s specifically intended to be used around snippets of regular HTML content.

Another request I got was for an easy way to turn an existing post into a Facebook tab. So now you can just add ?fb=tab as a query string added to the url for a WordPress post or page, and it will be displayed in the fbtab template. This essentially strips away the regular WordPress navigation and substitutes uses a stylesheet with smaller Facebook body and headline fonts. You can use ?fb=tab&resize=1 to get the template to include the resize JavaScript snippet.

Note that pages that include fancy layouts or large images may not translate neatly into content suitable for a Facebook page tab. But in some cases, I can see this as a reasonable way to have one piece of content you can manage through WordPress that appears on both your website and your Facebook page.

Finally, several people have found reasons why they wanted to make their own hacks to the template file. To allow them to do that without breaking compatibility with future upgrades to the plugin, I’ve added the ability to specify a file path to your own plugin that should be used as a substitute for the default.