Facebook recently began sending notices to many users of JFBConnect, the Facebook integration suite for Joomla, notifying them of upcoming changes to the Facebook platform. This email, referencing the "July 2013 Breaking Changes", contains some information on Facebook integration features that your site may use.
Please rest assured that the current releases of JFBConnect fully supports the upcoming changes. In almost all cases, you should experience no altered behavior, but there are a few things to watch depending on how you may have implemented your Facebook Like buttons or Facebook Comment boxes in Joomla.
Facebook periodically makes changes to their application platform that can change the behavior of existing features. When they do this, they create a 'migration' setting in your application. This allows you to enable the upcoming breaking change early and ensure that the features you are using are ready for the upcoming changes.
The primary changes in the July 2013 Breaking Changes update are:
Social Plugins (Like Button, Like Box) without absolute URL's in their `href` parameter:
This change simply means that you can no longer use a Like button that refers to a URL by using a relative link, like "/page/your-page.html". Instead, the URL should be a full, absolute, URL, like "http://yoursite.com/page/your-page.html".
JFBConnect always creates absolute links for Like buttons, Like-Box (JFBCFan), Comment boxes, or any other feature. The only way your site may be affected by this change is if you have created an instance of any of the above modules (or are using the {JFBCxxx} tag) and have used a relative link in the HREF parameter. If so, you should update any such instances to include your full website URL.
Non-threaded comments. Please see the developer roadmap for more details about this change:
In the future, the comment box will allow for replies to replies, generating much more engagement and an overall better commenting experience. If your notice showed this message, it simply means that you are using comment boxes on your site, but have not enabled the migration yet.
One of the huge benefits of using JFBConnect for Joomla is that you don't have to worry about these things. By using the Autotune utility built-in to JFBConnect, your migration settings are always kept up-to-date. If you haven't run the Autotune wizard recently, we recommend doing so. This will automatically enable the upcoming July 2013 Breaking Changes migration setting.
If you enable the migration setting and find that any of your Facebook integration features for Joomla start misbehaving, just let us know. We have excellent Joomla support so you can focus on your site and not the nuances of Facebook integration.
