Two clients have contacted me with this problem immediately upon upgrading from WordPress 3.5 to 3.5.1. I’ve posted to the WP support forum, but have yet to see any traffic on my question. Thought I’d try here, since it does appear to be on the Facebook side of things.
When we post a URL to Facebook, the preview comes up with no image (not a blank image square, but no image at all), the title is the URL, and the description is the URL. Two weeks ago, prior to upgrading to 3.5.1, the Facebook link preview worked exactly as one might expect.
I checked the code- the og:image tag is set correctly on all posts in question.
This morning, I tried the debug tool here: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug. For one of the problematic links, (http://dezignlicious.com/blog/2013/02/a-new-york-story-discovering-city-knickerbocker/), the og tags are incomplete (url, title, description) BUT the image tag is correct and the preview shows the correct title and description.
Here’s the rub: after I ran the URL through the debug tool, I was able to successfully post to Facebook and got a completely correct link preview.
THE QUESTION: Will updating the URL, title, and description og tags fix this problem? I assume there is a WordPress plugin that will allow me to add these additional tags per post. Can anyone recommend a plugin that they like for this functionality? I’m tempted to use “WP Facebook Open Graph protocol”, but there is not enough data to confirm that it works with WP3.5.1 (which has been the case for every plugin I’ve looked at this week!).
