Facebook

Normally wouldn't post a link to something without testing it out ourselves first (that's just not how we roll), but this one seemed worth sharing right away.

Saw this link come across Scoble's shared feed and was absolutely intrigued.   Seems one Mister Dave Cohen is working on a method for throwing your existing Drupal content over onto your Facebook account.  Also apparently will give Drupal developers a handy and familiar way to create Facebook apps. Pretty damn cool idea.

If you want to see it in action, take a look at http://www.drupalforfacebook.org and compare it to http://apps.facebook.com/drupalforfacebook/.  Like Nick O'Neill mentioned in his original post, Cohen's ported his Drupal install into the Facebook app.  Looks good.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I'm usually pretty down on the social networking stuff.  I have a Facebook account, but really haven't used it for much (feel free to look me up if you need a friend).  I haven't had that Facebook epiphany so many of its fans have experienced, and I don't really get the hype. 

All that said, though, coming from a Drupalistic perspective, I think this is pretty damn cool.  Gives those of us with a little Drupal experience a backdoor into the apparently ever-so-fabulous world of Facebook .  Wouldn't be a bad idea for the Facebook people themselves to fund some of Cohen's work to get this going...  Seems to be in their best interest to harness the Drupal vote.  Frankly, the idea of a Drupal site (like this one...) being seemlessly integrated with Facebook makes me all tingly.

Yesterday, that1guy asked if we had played around with Facebook authentication in Drupal in a thread over on Drupal.org. We hadn't yet at the time, but not being the kinds of nerds to back down from a challenge, we started to look into it.

Thankfully, we didn't have to do much. Halkeye's already submitted a dev version of a Facebook authentication module for Drupal called, strangely enough, facebook_auth.

If you've used Drupal for more than a few days, you've probably noticed that installing new modules is generally pretty simple. You download the module, decompress it in your modules directory, activate it in your site's admin page, and fiddle with any settings as appropriate. If you have any questions, there's typically a good README file in the package that breaks them down for you. Piece of cake.

Unfortunately, facebook_auth installation wasn't quite that easy. Had to jump through a few extra hoops to get it to play nice. Chalk it up to the fact that it's still in the early dev phases of the dance competition, but the README file included in the package left a bit to be desired... Still, though, after playing around with it for a little while, we got it working on our development site.

Installation

First thing's first... Uses Drupal 5.2 with PHP 5.1.6 and MySQL 5.0.27. Halkeye says he's "fairly certain head will work for both 5 and 4.7," but we only tested with 5.2. Seems to work.