VizualBusiness: Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love

Friday, August 17, 2012

Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love

Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love:

Since last Wednesday's update, we announced HACK the social web, launched a Payer Promotion API, added User intent to the Open Graph, shared Early results from the App Center and announced the Sample apps GitHub Account.

App Dashboard Updates

This week we are moving Sandbox Mode from the Advanced Section into the Basic Section. Sandbox Mode allows developers to restrict access to their apps to users that have been entered in the Roles section and is a great way to develop and test your app before releasing it to the public.

In addition, we are moving the Canvas Height and Canvas Width fields from Advanced into the App on Facebook section in Basic, allowing developers to easily configure their required settings.

Removing the need for Open Graph object titles

We're introducing title-less objects to give you greater control over how Open Graph stories appear on Facebook. With title-less objects, you can choose to reference objects either by title or object type.

Previously, all objects required a title. However, some objects don't have meaningful titles. For example, most people don't title each photo they upload. In the past, developers solved this by setting arbitrary and redundant titles for these objects, such as 'a recent photo', and stories would be rendered as follows:

With title-less objects you can simply leave the title blank. Stories then use the name of the object type when rendered:

To learn more, please see our title-less object documentation.

Update for Age-gating of Likes: Migrating Fans from Your Admin Page

We recently announced some changes to how you age-gate Likes. During the 90-days breaking change period you can convert your existing Facebook admin page for a Like Button into a public Facebook Page. Like counts on the original Like Button will be reflected on this new Facebook Page, and the Like Button should be reconfigured to point to this new Facebook Page. For more information, please see our documentation.

Upcoming September Breaking Changes

As announced in June, the following breaking changes will go into effect on September 5th, 2012:

Deleting FB.Canvas.setAutoResize

Renaming 'likes' property of Comments and 'votes' property of QuestionOptions

Minor change to admin.getAppProperties call

Returning actual size in photo_src table

Check out the Developer Roadmap for more info.

November Breaking Changes (90-day notice)

The following change will go into effect on November 7th, 2012:

No more payments reporting emails

We will stop sending payments reporting emails. You can download daily reports of transaction data using our Payments Reporting API.

The following changes can all be enabled/disabled using the "November 2012 Breaking Changes" migration until November 7th when they will go into effect permanently for everyone:

Actor name will always match the access token

Today when posting to a Page with a user access token for an admin of that Page, it's possible (depending on the user's settings) for the post to show up as coming from either the user or the Page. Going forwards, all actions will use the name of whatever entity the access token belongs to. If using a user access token, the name of the user will be used. If using a Page access token, the name of the Page will be used.

Notifications table no longer returns pid/aid for photos/albums

The object_id field on the notification FQL table will return photo ids and album ids (called object_id and album_object_id respectively in the photo FQL table) instead of pid and aid.

New permission required to read Page mailboxes

In order to read a Page's mailbox (PAGE_ID/conversations in the Graph API or unified_* FQL tables), you will need the read_page_mailboxes permission. The read_mailbox permission will now only give you access to a user's mailbox.

The following change can be enabled/disabled using the "External Page Migration" setting until November 7th when it will go into effect permanently for everyone:

Like Buttons and Stories to the Right Audience

We're updating the way you restrict the audience for the Like button, as part of the Like Button Migration, and resulting stories to give you more control. Going forward, in order to limit the distribution of age gating stories to people in the appropriate country or age group, you must include a metatag on your URLs indicating the restriction. Please review our documentation on how to do this. For more details, see the blog post where we announced this breaking change.