Comments on: Surprises with implementing Open Graph and the Like button

By: Open Graph Protocol For Facebook and Wordpress | Christopher W. Smith

Open Graph Protocol For Facebook and Wordpress | Christopher W. Smith — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 18:25:02 +0000

[...] Robert Reinhard’s post mentioning the incompleteness of it got me to thinking about how to effectively incorporate it into Wordpress. It seems that if you use the by-the-book way to setting it up, Facebook wants you to only promote objects (actors, movies, musicians, businesses, etc.) but not necessarily content (blog posts, news articles, etc.). There is an “og:object” META tag that lets you assign a specific object type so that the properly categorized page is created on the Facebook side of things. [...]

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 18:03:07 +0000

Not really. My implementation right now is using Wordpress’s post title variable (obviously, I don’t want to create a fan page for each single post), so it injects it into your friends’ stream without linking to anything on FB. I’m also using the permalink variable for og:url so that wall post links back to the post being promoted.

It’s not optimal, but still highly useful for promoting single posts.

THAT being said, you could get real fancy and set up some custom fields that you can attribute posts to say, an artist, or an album. Then, you’d create a page that parsed for all of the posts that had the “artist” custom field set to “The Beatles”. From what I understand, WP3 will be able to do this easier out of the box, but then that would give you a nice way to create an og:object and have your posts surrounding that object linked on the first jump.

I’m writing up some notes on this. I’ll ping this post when I’m done.

By: Robert Reinhard

Robert Reinhard — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:47:02 +0000

Nice Chris! Will it then use your existing Facebook page that references the same “og:title” and “og:url”?

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 06:49:48 +0000

Dear Robert and the BKWLD team,
For crying in the night, I just love your awesome graphics on this site! I am thinking on making my own website sometime soon.
Smiles, Eric C. from Sandra’s speech class at SCC

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 04:24:41 +0000

I’ve found (sort of) a workaround: omitting the type tag. When you omit the type tag, it does not create a new Page. Not super-optimal, but it’ll work for now.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 03:48:33 +0000

As of right now, there’s no way to connect the Open Graph Like button to an existing group. Kind of frustrating that they would overlook such an obvious thing.

On the other hand, I could see times where creating a new Page for every unique object *might* be advantageous, but, for the most part, I think it’s best to push it all the the same canonical URL/object. I do wish there were some sort of way to link a child object (say, an article) to the main Page parent object (blog). Sure, there are tons of plugins out there, but this should be built in functionality.

By: Justin

Justin — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 23:39:55 +0000

Great dissection of the Like button. I totally agree with how you guys implemented it, and will probably be implementing it in the same fashion elsewhere.

It would be nice if there was a less intrusive way to ‘like’ articles. Possibly a way to like a ’sub sect’ of an object/page.

In addition to the Digg and comments count, it would be nice to add Delicious and Twitter (retweet) with counts. Sometimes this can be pretty taxing with the respective networks current implementation.