[Plugin: Facebook Photo Fetcher] Conflicts with official Facebook Plugin from Facebook

Bram, the problem is that the Automattic/Facebook stand point seems to be “You will use OUR plugin and no-one elses”. It tramples over everything – og tag production, wordpress comments, share/like functionality and has no way of turning things off.

I modified my plugin to work alongside one of Justin’s and he made some mods in his to work with mine – that’s usually how it goes with WordPress plugins – we all want to make things work as smoothly as possible. But Facebook don’t seem to play along with that.

Thanks for your feedback.

First of all, let me start by stating that we want this plugin to work. That means with other plugins, including Facebook plugins. We’ve worked hard at fixing bugs and we’ve worked with the community to make it as good as possible. We’re not superhuman and we have limited resources–it’s going to take time. With that said, please leave feedback in http://wordpress.org/support/plugin/facebook.

So what are the explicit asks/suggestions here?

Follow ups to individual posts:

“Bram, the problem is that the Automattic/Facebook stand point seems to be “You will use OUR plugin and no-one elses”. It tramples over everything – og tag production, wordpress comments, share/like functionality and has no way of turning things off.”

That’s actually not true–where did you hear that? We’re open to feedback as to how our plugin can work with yours.

“The irony here being that the sloppy coding is by Automattic and Facebook who have done very odd things like using a customised version of the FB PHP SDK.”

Comments like these aren’t helpful. Also, this isn’t sloppy, but intentional. The official SDK doesn’t have certain things we need, like getting extended access tokens and forcing the need for cURL. There are pull requests in place to fix these issues, but for now we’re shipping with a modified SDK.

“That is a pity, because FB’s own plugin doesn’t support all features that I want (albums, login, registration). Maybe we can just spam them with things that don’t work – even though I highly doubt they will do anything about it :(“

1) Please don’t spam us, it’s not helpful. 2) I’m responding to this thread.

“that’s usually how it goes with WordPress plugins – we all want to make things work as smoothly as possible. But Facebook don’t seem to play along with that.”

We’ve worked with a handful of people from the community (including everyone posting issues in http://wordpress.org/support/plugin/facebook) to make the plugin better.

You’ve worked with a “handful of people”. The problem is that your plugin does simply trample over things and Justin’s example is just one of them.

Users can’t turn off your og tag producution is another, and it puts all the javascript for supporting FB buttons with, again, no apparent way or turning it off – the only solution for people who have other FB plugins, or have customised themes which implement bits of FB functionality, is disable those plugins and lose the functionality those plugins provide and/or edit their themes.

I’m quite lucky that I abandoned the FB SDK when I moved to GRAPH having had so many version problems with the old REST version (which the previous FB plugin for WordPress included and was out of date), so its just really “front end” problems that affect me.

I’ve got options in my plugin to turn off whole parts of its functionality (og tags, FB Social Buttons, the FB “initialisation” javascript) so that my plugin works along side other developers plugs and Justin and I both modified our plugins to stop them tripping over the other one.

I think you just need to realised that your plugin is NOT the only Facebook plugin for WordPress and just because its been co-authored by FB and Automattic does not mean that other plugins shouldn’t be taken into consideratiom.