Now, in your WordPress dashboard, if you search for Facebook, you’ll find tons and tons of Facebook plugins, but the ones that we are looking for is called
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Simple Facebook Connect. This is really a complete Facebook plugin system that enables you all kinds of functionality with your basic account and your WordPress blog. So I’m going to type in Simple Facebook Connect and click on Search.
Okay, so you can see Simple Facebook Connect over here, and I’m going to click on Install…and of course, make sure that any plugin you install is compatible to the WordPress version that you are using. Click on Install Now.
Once it has been installed, I can just click on Activate Plugin. Now, there’s a very high chance that you would get an error message that says something like this, ‘The base SFC plugin must be activated before this plugin will run.’ Now, don’t panic if you see this error message, just go back, go to plugins and click on Installed. Now this Simple Facebook Connect plugin is a bit different than other WordPress plugins, in the sense that it’s actually a plugin that contains many other smaller plugins. So it’s a collection of plugins.
So, as you can see here, from a single install of SFC or Simple Facebook Connect, I have actually installed several plugins over here, and there are about ten different plugins. So, I need to activate the base plugin first. Okay? And it says here – Base, so this is the one that I need to activate, first of all, so I’m going to click on Activate. Now it says ‘Simple Facebook Connect needs configuration information or Settings page. Plugin activated.’ Okay? So, the plugin has been activated, but I need to click on Settings, to set up the SFC or Simple Facebook Connect plugin.
Okay, so now the key ingredients of making this work is to have a Facebook application and to get your Facebook application a key. So if you already have a Facebook application that you’ve created before for your blog and then you can just log in to Facebook and get that secret key. But assuming you are starting from scratch, you need to look at this section where it says, ‘Haven’t created an application yet?’ Okay. So, the first step is to go to this link to create your application, so just click on Facebook Connect Setup…and now to create an application, you need to enter your site name, site URL, and select your language, which in most cases would be US, so let me fill this up, and when you’re done, just click on Create Application. And now it says, ‘Invalid url’, Invalid URL over here, well…Facebook very often changes things around a lot so sometimes the process may have changed, but if you cannot create an application just by clicking on Facebook Connect Setup, then you can just go to the Facebook application list page, and you can see My Applications… “You have no applications. Create one.†So I can either create one here or set up in the applications, it’s the same link. And I’m going to start with my application name. I’m going to agree to the Facebook Terms of Service and Create Application.
Okay, so I’ve created my application and now I have my application ID, my API key, and also my secret key. So this is all the three information that you gotta pay attention to, and it’s required over here, so: Facebook API Key, Application Secret, and Facebook Application ID. So I’m going to copy that…
Put it here, copy the secret key, put it here…I’m sorry, there goes the API key, okay, can get a bit confusing, so, make sure you copy the correct codes…and secret key, paste. Okay, now, in the section below this, a column for Facebook Fan page. Now, before Facebook applications became the standard way of integrating the WordPress blog to Facebook, a lot of business owners created Fan Pages. Now with an application, Fan pages are actually part of an application, so if you have an older version of the Fan Page, you can also put in the Fan Page URL over here, and otherwise you can just scroll to the bottom, click on Save Changes.
Okay, so that’s how you create a Facebook application and to connect that application to your WordPress blog. In the following videos, I’m going to show you how to add a Facebook Fan Box or a Facebook Like Box as it is called now, and also some other Facebook widgets to your WordPress blog, how to customize your Facebook application and how to promote your new Facebook application.