Question

I’m making a responsive site and need to include a Facebook Like-Box for the client’s Facebook fanpage. The developer page for the like-box has a widget for customization, but it doesn’t allow you to set a width in percentages.

I’ve searched around and the closest I’ve got was this page from 2010, which refers to a fb:fan widget that allows you to link custom CSS. I tried to get this tutorial to work but it fails with this error:

<fb:fan> requires one of the "id" or "name" attributes.

So, to recap, I need a Facebook Like Box that I can either set up to be fluid, or which allows me to pass custom CSS to the iFrame it generates. Anyone able to point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

You thought it couldn’t be done? AHA! Have at you, Facebook and your wicked fixed-width ways: I wrote a JQuery script to undo all your evil!

$(document).ready(function(){   
    var fbWidth;

    function attachFluidLikeBox(){
        // the FBML markup: WIDTH is a placeholder where we'll insert our calculated width
        var fbml = '<fb:like-box href="http://www.facebook.com/YOURFANPAGEORWHATEVS" width="WIDTH" show_faces="false" stream="true"></fb:like-box>';//$('#likeBoxTemplate').text().toString();

        // the containing element in which the Likebox resides
        var container = $('#likebox');  

        // we should only redraw if the width of the container has changed
        if(fbWidth != container.width()){
            container.empty(); // we remove any previously generated markup

            fbWidth = container.width(); // store the width for later comparison

            fbml = fbml.split('WIDTH').join(fbWidth.toString());    // insert correct width in pixels

            container.html(fbml);   // insert the FBML inside the container

            try{
                FB.XFBML.parse();   // parses all FBML in the DOM.
            }catch(err){
                // should Facebook's API crap out - wouldn't be the first time
            }
        }
    }

    var resizeTimeout;

    // Resize event handler
    function onResize(){
        if(resizeTimeout){
            clearTimeout(resizeTimeout);
        }

        resizeTimeout = setTimeout(attachFluidLikeBox, 200);    // performance: we don't want to redraw/recalculate as the user is dragging the window
    }

    // Resize listener
    $(window).resize(onResize);

    // first time we trigger the event manually
    onResize();
});

What is does is it adds a listener to the window’s resize event. When it resizes, we check the width of the Likebox’ containing element, generates new XFBML code with the correct width, replaces the containing element’s children with said XFBML and then trigger the Facebook API to parse the XFBML again. I added some timeouts and checks to make sure it doesn’t do anything stupid and only runs when it needs to.