Dave

@matt: thanks for the prompt response and updated version (haven’t had the time to test it yet, but will soon).

Regarding my misgiving about the state of version 1.0, as I said, it might be a case of high expectations: as an official plugin (twice official, since I believe WP put some of their weight behind it as well), I would have expected a very polished and full-featured plugin. As it is, I find it is geared more at increasing Facebook’s reach (by replacing certain functions that can be handled by WP locally, by their Facebook equivalent) and not as full-featured as one might expect. Two examples of what I mean:

– The post-as-author (and I suspect all other publish actions) merely submit the URL to the post, without providing specific data (such as a summary taken from the WP summary field, or a specific thumbnail)…

– The Facebook login to comment, apparently shuts down the WP commenting system altogether (and do not save them to the DB), meaning that if/when the FB plugin is turned off, all such comments disappear…

That and the near-absence of user-feedback throughout the code, such as when an API error occurs (hopefully fixed with this update). I must admit that having to spend a couple hours debugging the problem and waddling through code where exceptions are basically caught and discarded, did not put me in a particularly benevolent mood toward the plugin.

With this, I hope this update and the next will address this type of problems and eagerly await future versions…

Ran in exact same issues after double-checking all the set-up a dozen times (+ disabling all other plugins etc)…

I spent half my morning debugging this PoS of a plugin and here are the results (ongoing work):

• Checkbox gets unticked because the morons who programmed this plugin decided it was the appropriate response, when the posting fails due to an API error. Instead of, you know, displaying a freaking error message.

• Posting fails because the plugin uses what appears to be outdated API specs. Gory details for debug-minded people:
– WP’s implementation of makeRequest throws a mysterious ‘400 HTTP’ error.
– when running the same query manually, Facebook API returns code ‘2500’: Unknown path components: \/my-app-id:publish
– manually changing the API parameter to replace /<em>my-app-id</em>:publish by news.publishes successfully posts.
– haven’t yet figured an easy way to change that in the plugin itself…

Either way, it looks like FB devs cannot seem to keep up with their own API.

Update: THE FIX

Following bit of code-tinkering did the trick for me (until FB breaks their API compatibility again, I guess). Use at your own risk.

– Edit file fb-social-publisher.php
– Around line 344, replace:

$publish_result = $facebook->api('/me/' . $options["app_namespace"] . ':publish', 'POST', array('message' => $author_message, 'article' => get_permalink($post_id)));

By:

$publish_result = $facebook->api('/me/' . 'news.publishes', 'POST', array('message' => $author_message, 'article' => get_permalink($post_id)));

– Of course, you still need to have added the action to Open Graph in your FB app settings (follow the plugin instructions, except you need to create a ‘Publish + article’ action).

I suspect a similar fix can be done for the post-to-page function, but do not use it and do not really have the time to debug this too.

Incidentally: the publishing function of this plugin is quite poor: doesn’t bother posting a summary or suggesting a thumbnail… I threw away my own custom FB-posting plugin, thinking the official one would be better-supported and more advanced: bitter disappointment there.