Yes, it's Christmas - the kids are playing with their new toys and my wife is learning about new watercolor techniques she can do with the kit I got her... so I get some time to hack code. Here's a good one for you: I need to get different permissions for different users, for a specific reason - and I'll share the reason here, because I suspect this is something you can use for a feature. There appears to be no code for page management anywhere in the product, so I added it, myself. See the code below.
What this code does is pull out a user from the mapping table. This user is expected to be someone who has permissions to manage a fan page, which is the big issue here, as we will see. In this example code, which would be called from, say, a cron job or some other kind of trigger on an event, we get the access token for this user out of the mapping table, set it on the API, and call the accounts API function to get a list of all sites that this user can admin. NOTE HARDCODED COMPARE HERE: my testing page ID is hardcoded in for testing. This should be passed as a parameter or stored in the database.
Once the proper page is found, the page's access token is extracted and the post can be made. This allows posts to be made to pages AS PAGES.
The need here is for this mapping, when authenticated, to request manage_pages and publish_stream permissions. While publish_stream might make sense for most users, if you're not posting on the user's behalf, or using a different permission set, you won't want to ask for it. manage_pages, of course, one would never ask for outside of this usage.
Now, to test this, I "faked it" by adding those permissions to the additional permissions request field in the configuration/Facebook API section. I then logged in as this user, which granted the permissions on the access_token stored in the map, and then I removed those additional permissions from the configuration field. But this is a hack, of course, and would have to be repeated if the user ever logged out from Facebook and a new access_token had to be generated on next login.
The problem, of course, is that you cannot know who's logging in when they do a Facebook connect. But I suspect you COULD store additional permissions on a per-user basis somewhere and then test for them on login. If the test fails, you can then do an additional permission request. Since this is done for an administrator (presumably), the extra dialog is no big deal and expected.
PS: You probably thought about this for 30 seconds and realized the big win here - you could use this to create a feature where a link to an article is posted to a fan page, as the page, when the article goes "published." Think in terms of a category in the article manager that has an article or two set to publish ever day - and when they go live, this triggers a Facebook post. This could make JFBConnect a Facebook promotional engine. It need not be limited to articles - anything that can generate an event can generate a post this way. Brands could use this as a promotional engine in a set-it-and-forget-it manner for the most part.
In my case, this is used, among other places, to post a once-a-day post to a page announcing who has won a contest. "The winner of today's photo of the day contest is so-and-so." It also can post end-of-day summaries like, "we had 42 new users today and 283 new forum posts!"
But... it relies on knowing the ID of the user in the mapping table with publish_stream and manage_pages permissions, and making those automatically acquired on login (and, thus, associated with the access_token in the mapping table) is important here to avoid having to "fake it."
What say you?
public function fbtest()
{
$db =& JFactory::getDBO();
$fb_user_id = 999999999;
$db->setQuery("SELECT access_token FROM jos_jfbconnect_user_map WHERE fb_user_id=$fb_user_id");
$access_token = $db->loadResult();
require_once(JPATH_ADMINISTRATOR . DS . 'components' . DS . 'com_jfbconnect' . DS . 'assets' . DS . 'facebook-api' . DS . 'facebook.php');
$facebook = new JFBConnectFacebookLibrary();
$fbClient = $facebook->getFbClient();
$fbClient->setAccessToken($access_token);
$result = $facebook->api('/' . $fb_user_id . ''/?fields=accounts');
foreach ($result['accounts']['data'] as $page)
{
if (strtolower($page['id']) == '358473437989126')
{
$pageid = $page['id'];
$page_access_token = $page['access_token'];
}
}
$attachment = array(
'picture' => 'http://www.element67.com/templates/ih2012/img/logo400.png',
'link' => 'http://www.element67.com/somelink.html',
'message' => "This is the message that gets posted",
'caption' => 'This is the caption',
'description' => "This is the description of this post",
'actions' => array(array('name' => 'Enter a Contest!', 'link' => 'http://www.element67.com/contests/')),
'access_token' => $page_access_token
);
$result = $facebook->api('/me/feed', $attachment, true);
echo "" . print_r($result, true) . "";
}
Different permissions for different users?
