Integration with vBulletin - Facebook Connect - Allow your users to login with their Facebook account (for 3.8)

Staff Note: Moved to Graveyard - this will never work now that the old style facebook authentication is no longer available.


Facebook Connect
This add-on allows your guests and existing users to login with their Facebook account through Facebook Connect.

There is NO NEED to upgrade or reinstall if you already installed this mod for 3.7

Upgrade to 2.0.6 so that users with the new super long IDs will be able to login.


This mod conflicts with PhotoPost vBGallery!
Quick fix:
Disable the following PhotoPost vBGallery plugins:

• Userinfo Merge
• Integrate Postbit Showthread

Benefits of Facebook Connect

• Users can simply login with their Facebook account without going through the registration process.
• Increase user interaction and your traffic through Facebook notifications and news-feeds!

Features
Facebook users will be able to receive Facebook notifications when:

• There is a reply to their thread or a thread that they're subscribing to
• They receive a new PM

News-Feed will be published on to the user's wall when the user:

• Logs in for the first time
• Replies to a thread
• Creates a new thread

Fetch user data from Facebook
Fetch data like name, location, profile picture and use it on your forums! (NOTE: Some data may not be available for some users)

Automatically befriend user's friends
If any of the user's friends are also registered on the forum, they will automatically be friends!

Professional Install/Upgrade/Support Services
Want this mod professionally installed? It's guaranteed to work on your forum! Download the archive and see INSTALL.html/UPGRADE.html for more details!

Troubleshooting
Server Requirements:
PHP 5

If you get an error:

The Facebook Connect cross-domain receiver URL http://www.SITEURL.com/xd_receiver.h...%220.699%22%7D must have the application's callback URL http://www.SITEURL.com/forums/ as a prefix. You can configure the callback URL in the application's settings.

Means that there is something wrong with your callback URL. Your callback URL must be where xd_receiver.htm is; so when you enter [callbackurl]/xd_receiver.htm into your browser you should see a blank page (not a 404 page not found error or anything else).

If you get a continues this means there is a javascript error. Make sure you've done all the template edits correctly (especially footer & navbar). Clear your cache and reload the page.

If nothing happens when you click the Facebook Connect button make sure your callback url domain is the same as you forum domain (the one set in your forum settings) - more specifically make sure that there is a www (or isn't) in both domains.


Many more features may be implemented in the future so keep checking for updates.

[stickyslicks]

Thanks for a great mod! Installed without problems in about 1 hours. I had a lot more trouble with the Facebook Apps portion of the install than with the vBulletin side but I muddled through and the mod works beautifully on my test forums. I will complete the install on my production forums later today.

[wolfstream]

Originally Posted by merk_aus

I am having issues with it the button is there but doesn't open anything for people to sign in with?!?

Double, triple check your settings. The mod doesn't do that if it is setup properly.

Something to keep in mind:
I say this every few posts, but it is very important, so it bears repeating countless times.

IF you have installed this mod, do yourself a favor and put the users in a secondary usergroup, not your primary one. This will make debugging issues with users just that much more easy, and it will make it that much easier to recover things if you have issues, say, with the mod not running any more, or with facebook changing things (doubtful, but possible). This way, if something happens, you can easily identify the affected users and set up notices, flags, smoke signals,hand gestures based on the usergroup they're in! It also makes it easy to send out newsletters without bouncebacks (the facebook email address doesn't like normal mail), just leave that usergroup out!

Just a tip that I share every once in a while.

[wolfstream]

Originally Posted by BlueChipEarth

You must have short tags turned on for this to work!

Just a quick confirmation, clarification:
Short tags are pretty standard on servers , but there is a workaround for this:


Step 1: Open up fblogin.php and includes/functions_fbconnect.php in your text editor
Step 2: look for

PHP Code:

<?

Step 3: change to

PHP Code:

<?php

step 4: re-upload both files to your webserver where they belong.

Please note:
This WON'T affect most people (short tags are very, very common), but it may affect you.
How do you know if you're affected? Go to yourforumurl/fblogin.php . If it spits out text gibberish, you need to follow those steps. I'd upload fixes to that, but then we get into the whole redistribution of code garbage and I'd really rather not go there.

Also, another tip, because it's come up a lot in the past few months on installs I've done.

# Set the Callback URL to your vBulletin url (example: http://www.siteurl.com/forum/)

This is the #1 cause of all problems. Follow this exactly. Don't set it to http://www.forumdomain.com/ if your forum url is http://www.forumdomain.com/forum/

Common Problem #2?

# Go to the Canvas tab and set the Canvas Page URL (to whatever you want)

This should probably be set to your forum URL

[Joshva]

Hi all,

If you are using vbadvanced and create a new Usergroup for Facebook Connect. Make sure you check that the new usergroup has access to your vbadvanced pages.

[Joshva]

Does this work on IE 6?

[btotw]

Can someone give me a list of what one can put between "{*" and "*}"

???

The default templates have the following:

{*actor*}
{*threadurl*}
{*threadtitle*}
{*bburl*}
{*bbtitle*}

Are there more possible...?

Thanks...

[Merriweather]

FYI: The FaceBook connect mod does not work with the Zoints Anonymous Posting mod because it sends the info prior to the ZAP mod changing the userid, effectively "outing" the anonymous posted in the FB notice.

I actually need some help making it work, if anyone has the ability to help me out. For now, I've updated the fbconnect_new_reply_notification template to not include the username, but the problem is that if the FIRST poster clicked anonymous and they are a FB Connect user, when someone replies to the thread, the replier's FB notices says that they've sent a notification to XXX which is the user's name, and of course, that person posted anonymously, so I wouldn't want that happening! Ideally, I can just insert a check to see if the Anonymous Posting box is checked and if it is, change how the notices are handled.... ideas?

[CyberXZT]

Many thanks to wolfstream for assisting me with installation. He fixed a few glitches that I was having on my forums so if you need help, definitely ask him!

[bellaa]

thanks

[ZiG]

im having an issue with this mod, a security issue...

i linked me current existing account (an admin account) to my facebook account, which worked out alright...

then i have reports of another user telling me that when he logs into his facebook account, it logs him into my account (the admin account) automatically. i have no idea what the reason for this could be, but currently disabling the mod until i figure out whats wrong.

when users link their facebook account to their pre-existing account, what are the security features to ensure that they are the proper owner of that account?