How to Setup Facebook For Wordpress Plugin

Okay, so this is a very quick run-through of the Facebook for Wordpress Plugin, I got most of my info from a video by a nice guy called Don, I'll post the links to those resources at the end of the comments, or the end of the article. The plugin itself looks like it's been updated a little though since Don's video - the screens may look a little different, the options that we see are a little different. A couple of pointers as well that I noticed when I went through, I had a couple of problems, that I thought may be useful for you guys. I'm going to head over to my Wordpress Dashboard and go to Plugins. If you just hit Add New and type Facebook, then it seems to be the first plugin that pops up, as you can see I've already got it installed, but you can go ahead and install that. You'll then need to setup what's known as your App ID and your App Secret. Now, you get these by going to developers.facebook.com. This is an App that I've already setup, you can setup a new App by clicking on Create New App here, and then I'll just show you the settings that I've popped in for mine. So I've entered a Display Name, a Namespace, Contact Email, an App Domain, a Site URL, and a Mobile Site URL, and Save the changes. Now that's all I needed to get the plugin up and running on Wordpress. Once you've saved the changes, you'll then have access to the App ID, and App Secret, and then you just go back to your Facebook plugin settings, and pop those in App ID and App Secret, and Save Changes. Then you'll see just down in the Settings on your Wordpress Dashboard, you have access to setup things like your Like button, Send button, Follow button, Recommendations bar, Comments box, Social Publisher. Debugger & Insights I won't cover here. Social Publisher is pretty cool, that allows you to publish to your Facebook page, whenever you update a post to your wordpress blog. The comments box completely replaces the default Wordpress comments box. Recommendations bar - you need to make sure you tag this up correctly when you pop a post in to wordpress, but essentially then when a user nears the bottom of your page, the bottom of your content, a box will pop up recommending another post for them to read, you've probably seen this on quite a few sites recently. Follow button - a quick note on that, you'll have to have Following enabled on your Facebook account for that to work. And the Like and Send button, now, if we look at the Like options, the Like button options, we see there's an option here to also include a Send button alongside the Like button. So, there's a slight difference, I don't have the Send button setup for any of my posts or pages at the moment, and this is what it looks like - so it's Like & Send. Now, if you setup the Send button to be on Posts and pages, save it. There's a slight difference in the buttons, as you can see the Send button setup individually has the Facebook logo on it, otherwise it just looks like a normal comments icon, so it depends I suppose how much you think your particular visitors in general trust Facebook, you may want the Facebook logo on the Send button. Another thing - when I setup the plugin, back to the Plugins page. I popped in my App ID and my App secret here, and then nothing happened. I'm not sure whether there was a problem with the server, possibly I was logged into facebook as one of my pages instead of myself, that's sometimes an issue when you're setting up Facebook stuff. Maybe it just took an hour or so for authentication to happen, can't remember if I saw any warnings at the time, don't stress it if it doesn't work immediately, just come back to it later in the day, or the day after. Social Publisher setup - Enable Open Graph features, and I'm publishing to a specific page on my facebook profile, so that will pop out to my MangoPublic facebook page whenever I post to Wordpress. Okay so that's a very quick run-through, and I'll pop you a link to Don's original video, as I say the screens look slightly different now, but it's also a great resource for getting Facebook for Wordpress setup and running.