Question

I am about to start a new project building a web UI with a lot of different functionality. Part of the functions however include the ability to update and access certain social media sites – Facebook and Twitter primarily.

I would like the user to login to the system and then also have the ability to manage multiple FB/Twitter accounts so that they can interact with these all from one place without having to authenticate every time they go to do something. For security reasons I obviously don’t want to store passwords, but I’m not sure how to go about this one.

I know it’s possible – does anyone have any pointers on how to go about this?

FYI – I’m programming in PHP, Javascript/Jquery. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Here is the Facebook part. A good and easy way to do that is to use the Facebook PHP SDK (see on github). So you will have something like :

require "facebook.php";
$facebook = new Facebook(array(
    'appId'  => YOUR_APP_ID,
    'secret' => YOUR_APP_SECRET,
));

$user = $facebook->getUser();

If the user is logged in, then $user is his Facebook ID. You then have to check if you have a valid access token by making an API call :

• If it does not raise any exception, then you have a valid access token

• If it does, then you have to re-authenticate the user.

Here you go :

if ($user) {
  try {
    $facebook->api('/me');
  } catch (FacebookApiException $e) {
    $user = null;
  }
}

You need then to display the login or logout link :

<?php if ($user): ?>
    <a href="<?php echo $facebook->getLogoutUrl() ?>">Logout of Facebook</a>
<?php else: ?>
    <a href="<?php echo $facebook->getLoginUrl() ?>">Login with Facebook</a>
<?php endif ?>

When the user is logged in and you have a valid access token, you can make API calls to get data from Facebook :

$user_profile = $facebook->api('/me');

You may want to check the example page of the Facebook PHP SDK which is well documented.

Hope that helps.