Thread

Hi,

We’ve been working on this for a while and decided to announce that we’ve got something in the works. fabEE is an integration of Facebook Connect with EE. It allows visitors to your site to register/login using FBC. They are then full members of your site and can post items to their Facebook feed, for example when submitting a blog comment.

You can keep up with fabEE news at http://fab-ee.com or just follow me on Twitter.

Cheers

Dry

This is great news and I can’t wait to see what you will make of it.

I have but one question about this integration: how will the user profile of a member who logs in using FB Connect compare to a regular member’s profile?

Hi Bob,

The profile will clearly be a little different since as per the FBC terms of service a site cannot store personal details for extended periods. An FBC user’s username is their Facebook profile ID but their Facebook firstname and lastname is retrieved as required and cached. You are able to move them into different member groups if required etc since they are (for the most part) normal EE members.

Cheers

Dry

So in fact, there is no real ‘usable’ data tied to the FB users. For instance, they cannot be emailed using the communicate tab or receive notifications? Or they can, but only within a certain timeframe after their last visit?

That’s essentially correct. An FBC user has to give ‘extended permission’ to your app to allow it to email them for example. This can be done either from within the Facebook settings or within a fabEE app.

Cheers

Dry

looks interesting.

EDIT: This was in response to a member who is no longer active in the forums. I’ll leave it here since it might be relevant to others. The question was “So, a fabEE user will not have an email address?”

That’s right. Facebook does not ever provide that data. If a user provides ‘extended permission’ then it’s possible to use a proxied address to send email via FB itself.

Cheers

Dry

EDIT: This was in response to a member who is no longer active in the forums. I’ll leave it here since it might be relevant to others. The question was “So, in reality a fabEE user will be a ‘ghost’ member because they don’t have an email address?”

Well, they are full members in whatever group you assign them to. The fact that a ‘real’ email address is not automatically associated with the account is only going to matter depending upon the nature of your application. A new fabEE member profile is basically like any other except that all the checkboxes in Personal Settings/Email Settings are unchecked by default. The email address is a placeholder but the user will have a URL, his/her Facebook public profile page.

In the simplest scenario, you might have a interactive site that requires some form of authentication in order to comment on blog entries in member-only templates. fabEE allows site users to only have to remember one set of credentials *and* control how much information is provided to the site. It may be that the user wouldn’t want to provide any email address and in any other scenario would not be able to use your site. If you have an authenticated member that you can identify then you can moderate that member, ban that member, move him/her into another more or less privileged group etc.

It’s not just the UID that is available to view in the member profile; names, profile pics, Facebook friends and some other basic info can be requested and shown. The restriction in the FBConnect Terms of Service is that this data cannot be stored locally for more than 24 hours. So, an FBConnect-enabled application needs to keep requesting that data and checking it against the cached stuff.

I agree that few will voluntarily provide more information after registration (member custom fields) but the same problems clearly exist with all members of every site ever built.

Cheers

Dry

anyone know if this project is having any progress?  release date etc?
It`s an extremely interesting project which I`m almost just are waiting on before my website is ready to launch 😊

Hi,

This project is indeed progressing. There are some complexities which I’m trying to work around - I’ll detail those in a blog post in the near future. Unfortunately I cannot give you a full release date. Keep an eye on the fabEE blog (http://fab-ee.com/blog) or my tweets for updates.

Cheers

Dry

Thanks Drylouvre! Will follow this closely, its going to be the last piece of my little puzzle 😊

Hi,

A call for your assistance on the fabEE blog.

Cheers

Dry

How is the work on this going? all good?
I just stumbled upon this module for drupal: http://vishalsood.com/projects/drupal/facebook
The signup process on that drupal site with my facebook id was working excellent and I really hope fabEE will work in the same way or even better 😊

Hi Munno,

I haven’t seen this Drupal module. I shall take a look. fabEE is still going, albeit slowly in the last couple of weeks or so. We’ve been extremely busy with other projects.

Cheers

Dry

Sounds good Drylouvre, slow is a lot better than nothing 😊
Just hope you will get ready with fabEE soon and that it will have the same features as the Drupal module!

Keep on the good work! EE needs FabEE!