Question

I am attempting to allow users to supply me with their facebook link when registering and when their profile is created, I auto populate a facebook like box into their profile. The problem I am having is that the like box does not work with personal facebook pages.

I need a way to test if a url is a fan page or personal page before displaying so I don’t get an error on my page. The only way I’ve been able to test so far is using php strpos to search for the string “pages/” which is in many fan page urls. If anyone can help me out with a concrete way to determine which page a url leads to, please let me know.

Thanks

Answer 1

The Facebook Graph API, may be a way to solve this problem.

If you compare the User and the Page object, you will notice that there are some unique fields. For example a page has likes.

Now you only need to make a HTTP request to the Graph API and check if the response contains a specific field e.g. likes.

User: https://graph.facebook.com/btaylor

Page: https://graph.facebook.com/cocacola