Facebook Connect for MediaWiki
I have to say one of the coolest things about working with people is to see them succeed. When you put the right person in the right job, they flourish, and you get to enjoy all the benefits of their wonderful work. I recently found Rony Perez, a great part time programmer.
In my post on My Favorite MediaWiki Extensions, I mentioned that although I already had the Facebook Connect working on the site, there was still a lot of work to be done, and that I was looking for a programmer to help me finish the job. Well I found someone, and he has been amazing to work with.
Originally, all we had was the minimal functionality of just creating a new user account with a Facebook ID. That was nice and all – it made it really easy for people to create an account. My biggest problem with this was that I really had no way to contact people after they created the account. Sure, I could write on their message boards that came with the SocialProfile extension that I added, but that wasn’t really enough. Unless they went back to the site, and back into their profile, there was no way for them to see that they got a message.
Email:
With the user’s OK, Rony was able to get me email addresses for people when they sign up for a new account. It takes the information from their Facebook profile. There is a screen that asks users if they want to share that information from us, so we’re not prying where we don’t belong, but it seems if you’re going to the trouble to connect with Facebook, users don’t mind sharing that information too. This is huge.
Publishing:
The next thing that Rony did to make Facebook Connect a really powerful feature it that we are now able to publish new and modified pages on The Pet Wiki into the user’s newsfeed.
This is totally using Facebook Connect the way that it was meant to be. Think about it. If you spend time working on a page, don’t you want to let your friends know about it? They can read what you wrote and let others know about it. It’s incredibly viral.
Merging:
Have an old account, and what to start using Facebook Connect? No problem. Rony also added merging of regular accounts to Facebook accounts. Nothing gets lost. It’s very cool. I took the “Merge” feature out of the skin. I’ll be putting it back very soon.
The next thing to do will be to fill out the SocialProfile from information from the Facebook profile. That will be happening very soon.
All the work that has been done on the Facebook Connect extension will be shared back with the MediaWiki community. The original license is a GPLv2 license. People were nice enough to share it with us, it’s a really nice feeling to be able to give back.
Thank you Rony, for all the amazing work that you’ve done on this. I can’t wait to start the next project. 🙂
April 14, 2010 @ 10:41 am
Hi Rena,
I’m the original developer of the FBConnect extension. First of all, sorry the first version was so shoddy! The development was getting in the way of my Mechanical Engineering degree and triathlon training, and I feel bad for having been forced to put it aside in such a state. When I logged in to The Pet Wiki, I was utterly surprised to see it function on a 350-user-scale wiki. Rony Perez has truly done an amazing job innovating on the structurally-flawed extension I pushed out last year.
I say structurally-flawed because some issues probably can’t be fixed without a rewrite. Ironically, this is what I’ve been doing the past three weeks, unaware of Rony’s progress. I hope some of the core changes can benefit The Pet Wiki (imagine: no more ugly numbers as usernames or annoying xd_receiver.php issues!). Unfortunately, I don’t have an easy upgrade solution for the 20 Connected users currently on your site or the functions Rony added to fbconnect.js that are incompatible with the new Facebook Connect JavaScript SDK.
The new version works beautifully for me and a few other small wikis. Looking forward, I imagine that Rony’s contributions will be integrated into the current SVN trunk for a feature-laden mass of MediaWiki goodness. I’m hopping in the back seat again and a developer from a top-100-web-property is working toward getting the new version working on his wiki site, so hopefully this integration happens in the near future.
I hope this heads-up is beneficial to your wiki endeavor!
– Garrett
April 14, 2010 @ 6:21 pm
Hi Garrett!
It’s nice to meet you. Wow, a mechanical engineering degree and a triathlon? Does that make you a geek/jock? I don’t think that there are very many of those around.
Thank you for the original extension. Now I’m even more impressed with Rony than I was before. He worked really quickly to get what you see done.
I’m so glad to hear that you are working on the extension again. Do you know when you’ll be rolling it out with the new Facebook Connect JavaScript SDK? We only have a few Facebook Connect users so far, and I’m sure that they won’t mind registering.
I am so glad to hear that the numbers are going away. It has caused me a lot of headaches with some other extensions that I’ve installed (SocialProfile, ContributionCredits and AWC’s Forum). I’ve kludged together some work arounds, but I’m really not happy with them. It will be nice to be able to go back to the original code.
Thanks again!
Rena
April 15, 2010 @ 12:26 am
Hey Rena,
The new code has been checked in to SVN and can be found under the “download” part of the MediaWiki extension page. Also, I recommend following the development of the project at the SourceForge page (mirrored to a twitter feed I just set up: http://twitter.com/fbconnect4mw). The new Facebook Connect JS SDK has also been adopted. It’s much less of a pain to work with, but comes with a few growing pains that will hopefully get addressed by Facebook in the coming months (see http://github.com/facebook/connect-js/issues).
The geek/jock type is hard to come by, and I think I might know every single one at my school. I’m the president of a small engineering fraternity, and it’s an honor working with our handful of intelligent, active and diverse members.
And yes, the numbers are gone in place of an extra database table. This project was my first time working with any web-related technology, and the numbers were my “creative spelling” technique to avoid manipulating databases back then.
The extension’s been a big hit with our fraternity because it lets us control access based on a secret Facebook group, and also removes the annoying sign-in barriers of a typical wiki. Hopefully it isn’t too big of a pain getting your workarounds up to speed with the new code!
Take care,
Garrett
April 25, 2010 @ 7:25 pm
please help me so i can install fbconnect on website there is some problem in installation on http://hypnopedia.org
April 26, 2010 @ 4:31 pm
Right now, with the changes that Garrett has made, the code is in limbo. As soon as we get it sorted out, we’ll release it to MediaWiki.org
Change the Story, Change the World: The Art of Corporate Blogging
September 2, 2010 @ 8:12 pm
[…] to The Pet Wiki. The former is filled with actionable posts about setting up a Wiki, such as Facebook Connect for MediaWiki. The latter is told from a cat’s perspective, with posts like chilling with my babe. Both […]
January 29, 2012 @ 12:12 pm
Hi,
Is there an update on this?
I found the extension on mediawiki but the instructions are unclear, is there a walk through somewhere, espc. for the integration of the new functions?
August 1, 2012 @ 3:17 am
About to install the extension on our new wiki. Hoping for the best 🙂
August 1, 2012 @ 8:31 am
Nima, good luck! Let me know how it goes!