One of the things people want to do with Facebook Tab Manager is create a “reveal tab” effect where new visitors see one message, urging the people to click the LIKE button, and page fans see another message, perhaps displaying fan-only special offers or other content.
I’ve already introduced several techniques based on the fbtab and fblike shortcodes. These have the advantage of allowing you to mix and match blocks of content that will be displayed to everyone with other content that is conditional based on fan status.
The new technique I’m introducing with version 2.7.3 is based on designating alternate posts to be displayed based on page fan status, which are referenced using a special URL that includes a query parameter like ?fbreveal=100,200 where 100 is the ID of a post to be shown to the new people and 200 is the post for fans.
The new Reveal Tab Setup menu screen contains a utility that simplifies the process of constructing the URL.
One potential advantage of this approach is performance. Instead of loading a base post and then looking up additional content based on shortcode parameters, this method avoids some of the default WordPress processing and cuts straight to loading the fan or non-fan content (translation for programmers: the action for detecting a URL in this format is called on “init” rather than “template_redirect”).
Creating alternate posts for fans and non-fans may also be cleaner than marking up alternate blocks of content with the fblike shortcode. I think both techniques are valid, but I’d be interested in your feedback on this variation.