I’m working on some new features for a CMS, and I’m having trouble finding the information about how Facebook interacts with other websites. If turn key solutions exist for this I’d love to hear about them, but I’m basically just looking for pointers to documentation of how this stuff works behind the scenes. Including php, wordpress, and drupal since those are the base technologies I’m working with, but other platform solutions are welcome.
When you paste a URL into Facebook’s “What’s on your Mind” box, Facebook will automatically fetch a short page description, as well as a list of possible thumbnails. If there’s a video it will often auto-generate the needed HTML to embed the video. I’ve also seen features where you link to a business’s main website, but then are prompted to “like” their Facebook page.
How can I, as an independent website owner, have my pages reacts to Facebook in this way. For example, on the following page (link to a personal website) I have four images. However, if I drop that URL into a Facebook status update, there are no thumbnails for those images.
Also, while I’ve inferred several features of the notification box, I’m curious if there’s other’s I’m not aware of.
Again, while turnkey solutions and existing plugins are of interest, what I’m really after is what sort of meta data I need to embed in my own page, or what special responses I need to make to Facebook requests. In other words, how do I program a website to response correctly to Facebook.
Basically you convey that information to user in terms of open graph meta tags. From that Facebook picks up what type of site it is. Is it about a book or some music or some commerical brand or may be has a FB page linked to it? Check this documentation for general idea about graph objects – https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/using-objects/
Coming to specifically the image used as thumbnail, it is specified with
og:imagemeta tag. Important thing to note about it is that FB caches that for ~24hours so don’t sweat it if it doesn’t show up. You can use this tool to check for your values which fetches it in realtime – https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debugAlso Facebook happens to have quite a lot of bugs around this, so it might take really long before it start showing up. If its picked up debug tool, then you are fine at code level. Not much that you can do about it.
I happen to know about this as I authored a tiny WordPress plugin for that and boy I know the support requests that used to come in. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook-like-thumbnail/
Now for 3rd part of your question, even this is specified through meta tags only, like you have primary video content on your website, and you would like it to embed on Facebook when someone puts a link in the status box, so for that this link has code samples http://garethhooper.com/articles/social-media/45-integration/166-how-to-embed-your-own-videos-on-facebook-using-the-facebook-like-and-share-buttons.html
Hope that sets you on track giving you a head start 🙂