Question

Howdy. I’ve been tasked with making a Facebook game, but I’m new to Facebook development, so I’m just getting started. Apologies in advance if this is a no-brainer to people.

I’m having trouble following all the examples I see on sites, and I keep running into missing pages in the Facebook documentation when I am trying to read up. I think it’s because there’s a new version of the PHP Client Library for Facebook, and everything I’m finding is referring to the old client.

For instance, I see this code in a lot of examples:

require 'facebook.php';
$facebook = new Facebook( array( 'appId' => '(id)', 'secret' => '(secret)' ) );
$facebook_account = $facebook->require_login();

…but there’s no “require_login()” in the client library provided in the facebook.php file.

From what I can tell, it looks like Facebook has very recently rolled out some new system for development, but I don’t see any sample code anywhere to deal with it. The new library comes with an “example.php” file, but it appears to be only for adding “Log in with Facebook” functionality to other sites (what I’m assuming is what they mean by “Facebook Connect” sites), not for just running apps in a Canvas page on Facebook itself.

Specifically, what I need to do is let users visit an application page within Facebook, have it bring up the dialog box allowing them to authorize the app, have it show up in their “games” page, and then have it pass me the relevant info about the user so I can start creating the game. But I can’t seem to find any tutorials or examples that show how to do this using the new library. Seems like this should be pretty straightforward, but I’m running into roadblocks.

Or am I missing something about the PHP client library? Should require_login() be working for me, and there’s something broken with my implementation, such as having the wrong client library or something? I downloaded from GitHub yesterday, so I’m pretty sure I have the most recent version of the code I have, but perhaps I’m downloading the wrong “facebook.php” file…?

Answer 1

The following is a rewrite of the old require_login function. It exactly duplicates the old functionality.

function facebook_require_login($required_permissions = '')
{
  global $facebook; // NOTE GLOBAL FACEBOOK OBJECT, MUST ALREADY BE INSTANTIATED

  $user = $facebook->get_loggedin_user();
  $has_permissions = true;

  if ($required_permissions) {
    $facebook->require_frame();
    $permissions = array_map('trim', explode(',', $required_permissions));
    foreach ($permissions as $permission) {
      if (!in_array($permission, $facebook->ext_perms)) {
        $has_permissions = false;
        break;
      }
    }
  }

  if ($user && $has_permissions) return $user;

  $facebook->redirect(
    $facebook->get_login_url(Facebook::current_url(), $facebook->in_frame(),
                         $required_permissions));
}