socialmedian: How to Write Your Own Facebook App in 5 Minutes

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How to Write Your Own Facebook App in 5 Minutes

Source: Digital Inspiration

Sep 30, 2009

Summary

Do you know that the Facebook Apps Directory now contains more than 350,000^ Facebook applications for their 300 million users.

Whether you are looking to embed presentations in your Facebook profile or want to share your favorite books and movies with friends or just want to spend time playing a word game with strangers, chances are that there already exists a Facebook app to solve your problem.

However if you are feeling a little more adventurous and want to develop your own Facebook App that works the way you want* and doesn’t carry any third-party branding or advertising, here’s a an easy tutorial to help you get started.

[*] Check out apps.facebook.com/digitalinspiration.

[^] For comparison sake, the Apple iTunes store is relatively bigger as it has about 85,000 apps for their 50 million iPhone + iPod Touch users worldwide.

How to Write a Facebook Application in 5 minutes

The Plan: We’ll write a basic Facebook app that will have links to our social profiles and a Google site search box. Later, you can expand the idea to build slightly more complex applications

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Comments (1)

Laurel W,

Oct 01, 2009

We’ll write a basic Facebook app that will have links to our social profiles and a Google site search box. Later, you can expand the idea to build slightly more complex applications that contain RSS feeds, video clips, etc.
Step 1. Assuming that you already have an account on Facebook, add the Developer application to your Facebook profile and then click "Set Up New Application".
Step 2. Give your new Facebook App a name, agree to the terms and then upload some image for your application logo.
Step 3. From the Application settings, choose Canvas and set FBML as the rendering method. The other option is IFRAME but we’ll use FBML for the moment to keep things simple.
Step 4. Using any WYSIWYG HTML editor (or even notepad), write the content that you want to display inside your Facebook application.
Step 5. Log in to your web server where you’ll be hosting the Facebook App and create a sub-directory called "facebook". So if you domain is example.com, the Facebook app can be accessed.
Step 6. While you are inside the "facebook" directory, download the Facebook library (through wget) and extract the files in this archive via gunzip and tar. Now execute the following command to move facebook.php and other library files outside the facebook-platform subdirectory.
Step 7. We are almost done. Go back to your Facebook Application page in the browser, click "Edit Settings" and set the values for Canvas. That’s it. To read more: http://personalmoneystore.com/Payday-Loans/