Wordpress

People who host WordPress blogging software on their own servers can use Fat Panda’s SharePress to post content to Facebook.

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Coding Futures joins the fray of developers extending WordPress onto Facebook.

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A new plugin for WordPress blogs incorporates Facebook log-in capabilities to offer readers a more convenient way to register for commenting privileges.

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Want to instantly add Facebook’s Like button to your WordPress blog? No need to worry about dealing with Facebook’s upgraded JavaScript SDK or anything else. You can simply install the new WordPress Like plugin and get up and running in only a couple of clicks. The new plugin works with both XFBML and as an iFrame. While there are some challenges of using Like button’s with the old Facebook Connect library, this new plugin should make implementing the Like button easy for WordPress site administrators.
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While not all your friends want to read every update from your company’s blog, there’s a lot of value in cross-promoting your blog posts on Facebook. If you want to learn more about effective cross-promotion strategies, read day 25 of our Facebook Pages guide. While there are numerous blog platforms, we highly recommend WordPress, as we use it to power this site. Below is a list of 10 of the most useful WordPress Plugins and applications that integrate your blog with Facebook.
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Today Facebook will anounced the launch of their plugin directory. Included in the launch of their plugin directory is the release of a number of WordPress plugins that you can implement on your site. I have yet to test out the WordPress plugins but I’m sure they are good. I’ve already run into a number of issues related to wp-cache and wp-super-cache.
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A few sources have alerted me to a project that Facebook has been working on: integrating Facebook Connect directly with WordPress. For all you developers that also thought that building a Facebook Connect plugin would be brilliant idea, you might want to stop development. While the timetable for releasing this plugin isn’t clear, there’s a good chance that it will be released in the coming weeks.

Facebook Blog Comments

Facebook Connect is still in beta mode and can only be accessed by developers but there is actual code from this plugin floating around (we actually have a copy of it). This means that rather than having to register for every site that you visit, you will simply be able to login with your Facebook account. Soon enough, it will also mean that you will have access to all of your friends that are on Facebook on any other site you visit.

For the time being, the plugin functionality is limited to comments. How does this work exactly? If you were at f8 then you saw David Recordon of Six Apart, demo the functionality of Facebook Connect comments in Moveable Type. In similar form, you will go to a comment form, click on a link which logs you into the blog’s application on Facebook and then your comments to that blog will start showing up in your Facebook profile feed.

The difference with the Facebook WordPress plugin is that the WordPress plugin is an internal Facebook project. This also means that Facebook wants to be able to own the comments on your site. Anytime you enable users to login via Facebook, you won’t have access to their email address, unlike Disqus and native WordPress comments. That would probably be my greatest complaint.

Blogs as An Extension of Facebook

In the not too distant future, WordPress will be unveiling a much anticipated social network service for WordPress blogs: BuddyPress. The new service enables site owners to integrate social networking features directly into their blogs. If you thought remembering all of your logins was hard before, imagine what it will be like when every site you visit has its own social network.

Find a new friend on a remote social network? You can easily add them as a Facebook friend rather than having multiple locations for all of your connections. So how soon can you expect to launch Facebook functionality into your own site? No timeframe is available yet based on publicly available information.

The launch of social networking features into blogs that integrate with Facebook Connect will directly compete with Google’s Friend Connect service (which already has a service in beta).

Conclusion

While you can’t test out this plugin without being a developer, this is definitely a great first step. It also makes me wonder why Facebook put internal resources to this project when there are countless other developers working on their own WordPress Facebook plugins. My guess is that this plugin was being developed to further the Facebook Connect documentation.

My only complaint remains to be that I don’t get access to a user’s email when they “register” to comment on my site. Leveraging this plugin provides blogs with a great opportunity to gain exposure through the Facebook news feed. Please note that if you’ve tried out the plugin but it doesn’t work, it was developed using the “Kubric” default theme on Facebook. That’s according to documentation provided by Adam Hupp, the Facebook developer behind this project.

Update
We’ve been contacted by Facebook and asked to remove the plugin since it isn’t licensed for distribution. I’ve gone ahead and done so Also, they’ve said this wasn’t technically an “official” internal project as he was working on it in his free time. Not sure what to say about that.