Facebook Portlet v2.0-alpha-1
See Facebook Portlet for information about this portlet.
License
See license.
Source
svn co https://source.jasig.org/sandbox/FacebookPortlet/tags/rel-2.0-alpha-1/
Configuration
To configure the portlet, change the facebook.properties file to include the Facebook application id and application name. See facebook.properties for more info.
cd rel-2.0-alpha-1 emacs src/main/resources/facebook.properties
Build
To build, you must be using Maven 2 or possibly 3 and:
mvn clean install
Deploy
You must follow the instructions for your specific portal to deploy. Deployment alters web.xml. Without the change resulting from deployment, the war does not have what it needs to be recognized by the portal.
Publishing
Follow the instructions that come with your portal.
Styling/CSS
This portlet assumes that all styling for it will be done in the skin. It uses the CSS classes defined in PLT.C in JSR-168/JSR-286 where appropriate.
Troubleshooting
Firebug and the Error Console in Firefox were my friends while trying to get the Javascript working. The only thing done server-side by the portlet is to take the two values in the configuration file and feed them into the Javascript. Everything else is client-side.
Notes
The old one v1 portlet was doing a string ID -> Integer -> string conversion and Facebook IDs now exceed the maximum Integer and the API it used was old/deprecated. Updating to use a newer app id seemed to break it, so after seeing that the Facebook Connect API portlet that was in incubation was not stated to be working with pre-3.x versions of uPortal, we decided to rewrite one that did.
There are some current concerns about 2.0-alpha-1 portlet, even though it works and is being used in production at Duke:
1. Div with id "fb-root" required for the Facebook javascript to work properly. But, perhaps we could change this, as I've not tried to modify it since we started using the javascript script tag injection we got from http://thinkdiff.net/facebook/graph-api-javascript-base-facebook-connect-tutorial/ .
2. portlet.tld is included in source currently, and I can't remember if that is needed for the JSP pre-compilation, but this could probably be easily fixed with a modification to pom.xml and removal from source.
3. There are likely some UI mods needed (default hover CSS style for rows could be included, etc.)
4. FQL queries for the feeds are touchy but they might need to be tweaked to try to provide a feed just like the normal (friends) news feed, if that is possible. Currently they provide newer news than what is displayed in either of my (friends) news feeds in Facebook.
5. Shows "Unknown" picture and user name for messages from likes that aren't friends (which is wrong, but I haven't looked into fixing yet).
6. Doesn't indicate when a post is directed to someone else.
7. There are a number of other types of types posts it could display a little better than it does.
Questions/Feedback
Please post all questions/feedback on the uportal-users list. If you are absolutely sure it is a bug in the portlet, please add a ticket in the Jira project listed on the main page for this portlet.