The full site content is available now on mobile devices. Previously, the full-width site would display on the iPad and a special “smartphone” theme was used for phones. That smartphone theme didn’t look similar to the full website and didn’t display all the content of the site. So the site now provides a much better experience for mobile devices, while still being optimized for desktop and laptop browsers as well.

I also wanted to provide a more modern look to the site. Sites these days are not only fully responsive, but provide a cleaner, simpler look with more “whitespace” between the various pieces of content. If you look at our home page, for example, you’ll see how its still graphically rich but a much cleaner look.

For now, I have left the top navigation, right sidebar content, and footers essentially the same as the old site. This was done intentionally so users wouldn’t be so completely disoriented by the new site design. However, over time I will be the footers and perhaps eliminating the right sidebars altogether and using the extra space to format the page content itself in two columns.

Please feel free to let us know how you like the new site. Please note that the Facebook Friends and Facebook News Stream pages are driven by our XtremelySocial app on Facebook and it hasn’t yet been optimized for mobile. However, if you run into any formatting issues with anything else on the site, please let us know.

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My Greetings was the first Facebook application that I wrote and the reason that I wrote it was because all of the other greetings-style apps simply generated SPAM with “requests” send to your friends and the apps were jam packed with advertising. They also required to you slowly “unlock” greetings by sending more and more of them.

At the time, Facebook’s app platform was based on what they called FBML (Facebook Markup Language). They had all sorts of Facebook-specific commands that let you fairly easily put together an app. They weren’t supposed to official kill off FBML apps until June 1, 2012, but they have already abandoned so many of the FBML commands that apps written using them no longer work.

Facebook is now pushing javascript-based “iframe” applications and the new “open graph” API’s. I have rewritten all of our other applications using these methods, but it has taken a massive amount of time. I can see why they are going in this direction because javascript is a much more widely adopted language for web-based apps. However, there are many things that used to be very simple in FBML that now require a ton of programming or aren’t even possible at all.

I still like the idea of a simple greetings application for Facebook and may consider adding greetings to one of my other apps, such as My Status or the newer XtremelySocial app. Those apps both let you update your status and post on your friend’s walls, but they are text-based only for now.

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Sweet Chalet

I wanted to highlight the Facebook Page from one of our users. Its simple, but elegant and I thought it would be great to share just one idea about what our users have done with the app.

Sweet Chalet is out of Toronto, Ontario and sells cakes and other sweets. You can visit the Sweet Chalet Facebook Page to check them out.

Again, if you have an interesting Facebook Page that uses one of the My Info family of custom page tab apps, please share it with us!

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Example Use of My Info: Custom Tab on Facebook

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For performance reasons, we are only displaying the first two to three likes and comments, just like Facebook does on their own pages. If you click “View All” then you will be taken to a full Facebook page for that status update that shows you all of the comments.

Please note that we have not yet added back the ability to post new comments, but we are working on that as well as allowing you to like a checkin or comment.

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For performance reasons, we are only displaying the first two to three likes and comments, just like Facebook does on their own pages. If you click “View All” then you will be taken to a full Facebook page for that status update that shows you all of the comments.

Please note that Facebook only exposes your past status history to a certain point. It is a function of both the number of status updates as well as how long ago they were. Users that post a high volume of status updates won’t be able to go as far back in time as users with less status updates. Unfortunately, this is a limit of Facebook and there is nothing we can do about it.

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Now that we have rolled out banner ads on our My Info and Welcome Tab applications (to page admins only, not to viewers of the pages), we have a few cents a day coming in to help us pay the annual fee for an SSL certificate. So we are now supporting SSL throughout all of our Facebook applications. This means My Greetings, My Places, and My Status also have full SSL support.

This means you can turn on Facebook’s secure browsing preference and seamlessly use our Facebook apps without having to switch out of secure mode. While none of our apps send any sensitive data, it was annoying to our users to have to switch back and forth between secure and unsecured modes.

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Also, notice that we have changed the default My Places “home” page to display friend checkins rather than your personal checkins. We figured that would be a more interesting thing to see when you first launch the app. Of course, you can always click “My Checkins” and see all your personal checkin history just like the old “home” page used to show.

Upcoming enhancements that we are working on are:

• Ability to like (and unlike) a checkin right from within My Places
• Ability to check in to a place once you’ve searched and found the place you want to check in to.
• Display any pictures uploaded with the checkin. This is a brand new feature Facebook just added a few days ago.

As always, please let us know if you run into any issues.

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My Places – View your Facebook Places Checkins and Your Friend’s Checkins

Read More Try It Now!

Application Features

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Here’s a full list of the enhancements:

• Moved the Twitter Connect logic out of the main My Status page as this was sometimes causing problems for folks just wanting to view their Facebook status history and not connect to Twitter.
• Now displays your Facebook and Twitter status and the update status form on every page, not just the home page. This makes it much more convenient for Twitter users.
• Added Retweet and Reply features to the Twitter pages. You will need to have Javascript turned on in your browser, but its just a few lines of code.
• Added a dynamic character counter that shows you how long your status message is as you type. It also shows a reminder of Twitter’s 140 character limit (not including a URL) and Facebook’s 255 character limit. This also requires Javascript, but its only 2 lines of code.
• Added a hidden feature to let you view your Facebook Status starting with the oldest posts first. Just use this URL and you’ll see the oldest status updates that Facebook is still storing on the first page. http://apps.facebook.com/my-status/?sort=oldest. The navigation links now say “Next Page” and “Previous Page” to avoid confusion, depending on your sort order.

I hope you enjoy the enhancements and as always, please let me know if you run into any problems by emailing webmaster at xtremelysocial dot com.

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As always, if you run into any problems, please let us know by emailing tim at xtremelysocial dot com.

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Facebook changed the way applications work and for brand new users we have to now specifically ask you to be able to read your status and update it. That’s great from a privacy perspective, but it caused problems with new users not being able to see their status history. Existing users were “grandfathered” by Facebook, so if you don’t see a link to re-authorize My Status on Facebook, then you are all set.

Also two days ago Twitter changed the way you have to authorize us to read your Twitter status updates and other private timelines. If you want to view and update your Twitter status, you will need to click the Authorize Twitter link on the main My Status home page to allow us to do so on your behalf. Ultimately, this new method is better because we don’t have to send your user ID and password to Twitter. Once you authorize it, Twitter knows who you are and that My Status is allowed to view and update your status.

In addition, we added the ability to view your Twitter favorites. This was quite easy to do and hopefully its useful to everyone.

Thanks to all you great users of My Status out there, we now have about 78,000 monthly active users! This is now our most popular Facebook application and as a result I will be spending more time on enhancing it.

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The first batch of custom tab names will be:

• Welcome
• About Us
• About Me
• Our Services
• Our Specials

These were selected as the most general appeal for both personal profiles and fan pages. Please let us know if you have suggestions for future tab names.

Here is a screenshot of a new Welcome tab I created right on the main My Info fan page

If anyone is interested in more details around how this works, I’ll share that here. Facebook doesn’t allow 3rd party applications to alter the name of the custom tab. We can only set one tab name that is hard-coded for everyone that uses the app. The only way to provide different tab names is to build separate apps for each name. That is precisely why it took so long for me to roll out this feature… because its certainly not feasible to write and maintain a dozen or so different applications.

So what I’ve done is found a creative way to have multiple Facebook applications that all point to the same application source code. So I can maintain the main My Info application code base and all the other “helper” apps with different tab names will naturally be updated.

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Here is a screenshot of My Info previewing the new narrower tab size.

I’m sure everyone knows by now that Facebook will also be removing all custom profile boxes from personal profiles and fan pages starting that same week. That leaves custom profile tabs as your only option, so you will want to make sure to create one before then. You might also like to know that for your fan pages, Facebook will let you specify which tab first displays to new and existing users when they arrive at your page. This will let you set My Info as the default tab.

See the article Facebook Developer Blog: Profile and Page Roadmap Update [Profile Boxes to be Removed Aug 23,2010] for more details.

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Our long-time users will remember that we used to support this feature, but Facebook limited you to three (3) friends at a time. We dropped support for this when Facebook completely changed how third-party applications can publish to a user’s stream. In fact, Facebook doesn’t support sending anything to more than one friend at a time anymore, but we found a way to loop through the friends you pick and fire off individual greetings to each of them.

We hope you enjoy this new feature. Just be responsible in what you send to large numbers of friends. We may have to put a limit on the number if things get out of hand, but for now its wide open. As always, if you run into any problems, please email me.

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The best part about this is that its all automatically handled by WordPress and they have already built in a “hook” to easily do this. If WordPress finds a file called maintenance.php in your /wp-content directory, it will use that file instead of the default blank white page.

The key thing to note is that while your site is in maintenance mode, you can’t be sure that you will have access to the traditional WordPress theme template tags or functions, such as bloginfo(‘name’) or bloginfo(‘description’) or theme “options” fields that configure the various aspects of a theme. So you’ll need to “hard code” your site name, description, the text that displays, the URL’s to image and links.

If you are good with HTML, you can code up whatever you’d like. However, the easiest way to do this is to install a theme that you like, configure it, display it in your browser and then “view source” to grab the HTML code. You’ll want to grab the full HTML from the top <HTML> tag through the bottom </HTML> tag. This needs to be a fully-functional standalone HTML page. It really is just about that simple.

The only thing you need to do beyond grabbing the HTML code is to add the following to the maintenance.php file.

At the very top, add the following code. This code will tell the search engines that your site is only temporarily unavailable and to try back in 10 minutes.

<?php
/* DON’T CHANGE THIS – IT TELLS SEARCH ENGINES THE SITE IS ONLY TEMPORARILY UNAVAILABLE */
$protocol = $_SERVER["SERVER_PROTOCOL"];
if ( ‘HTTP/1.1′ != $protocol && ‘HTTP/1.0′ != $protocol )
   $protocol = ‘HTTP/1.0′;header( “$protocol 503 Service Unavailable”, true, 503 );
header( ‘Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8′ );
header( ‘Retry-After: 600′ );
/* END DON’T CHANGE THIS */
?>

At the very bottom of the file, add the following line. Since WordPress is including this file into its program that handles the upgrade, its important that you tell WordPress to drop out of this section of the code when its done displaying this maintenance mode page.

<?php
/* DON’T CHANGE THIS – IT PASSES CONTROL BACK TO THE WORDPRESS UPGRADE ROUTINE */
die();
/* END DON’T CHANGE THIS */
?>

Here is a screenshot of the page that I’ve created for XtremelySocial.com.

Here is a link to view the Maintenance Mode Screen for XtremelySocial.com. You can cut and paste the HTML from that page if you’d like to use it as a starting point, but make sure you install the ice-breaker theme from CustomTheme.com that it is based on. My page needs the images, and css from that theme to work.

There are some really great “under construction” WordPress themes that you can use to generate your initial HTML code and paste it into your maintenance.php file. Check out the article Top Themes and Plugins for Under Construction WordPress Blogs from techcats.net.

Update 5/26/10: Note that this seems to only work in WordPress 3.0. Older versions don’t seem to handle automatically placing your site in maintenance mode properly. The code is there to do it, but it doesn’t seem to work. If anyone has a quick fix, let me know. If I find a fix I’ll post it here.

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If you don’t have a particular article in mind that you want to comment on, feel free to use our Community Wall. Its a wall for this site, much like a Facebook page wall.

As always, please let me know if something isn’t working correctly on the site by emailing web master at xtremely social dot com.

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Look for the new My Status icon on your publisher. If you don’t see it, then click the drop-down arrow in the publisher and you should be able to select it. What’s nice is that after you use My Status to update your status, the icon will be visible for more easily selecting it the next time.

Note that if you haven’t already set up your Twitter User ID and Password, you’ll need to do that from the main My Status home page. Facebook won’t let us collect a password in the publisher, which I suppose is a good thing. So you’ll need to configure your Twitter credentials first and then you can use the Publisher. I’ve provided a link in the publisher to make it easy.

As always, please let us know if you run into any issues. Please use the My Status About/Support Page or you can use my email address which is on the XtremelySocial.com About Us page.

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I’ve also updated the links in your My Greetings history and friend birthday lists to link directly to that person’s profile publisher with My Greetings already loaded. This makes it much easier to quickly send a greeting to a friend, especially considering that still can’t send greetings directly from the My Greetings home page. I’ll be working on getting that fixed after updating the application to more fully support the Applications Dashboard.

The Applications Dashboard is supposed to allow for three kinds of “news and activity” related postings. I have implemented the code for two of them, but their are serious bugs in the Facebook developer API’s that are effecting all applications such that these news/activity items do not actually show up in the dashboard. Facebook is aware of these issues and is supposedly working on a fix.

Since I’ve already put the code in place, as soon as Facebook fixes the issue with them not displaying, you should immediately start to see the following:

1. You should see a message under the My Greetings icon in the dashboard informing you that you have received a greeting from a friend.

2. When viewing the applications that your friends are using in the dashboard, you should see a message about what greetings they have sent or received.

The third type of news item in the Dashboard are global application messages. I have not yet implemented that, but plan to do so at some point. For now I’m still displaying application announcements on the My Greetings home page and you should also still be receiving them in your Facebook news stream under “Updates”, if you have become a fan of My Greetings.

Please check out the related articles below for more information about the new Facebook home page and apps and games dashboards.

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Facebook updated their stream API’s yet again which broke the individual wall pages. Only public posts were being displayed even if you were friends with that person. That issue is now fixed.

We also fixed an issue where posts with multiple images were not being displayed properly. These posts will now display all the images. We also added the image caption text.

We changed all the Facebook links throughout user profile pages, walls, and activity stream to launch Facebook in a new tab/window. Each click will launch in the same tab, though, so you won’t have to deal with a ton of browser windows opening up.

We made several enhancements to the individual post links as well. We increased the font size and now display the name of the application that was used to post the item with a link to that application. We also are now displaying the “action link”, which is the application-specific link to help out your mafia, see what they said, take the poll, or whatever.

We also added just a bit of space between the post comments to separate them a bit and have them look more like they do on Facebook.

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I have no idea why Wordpess doesn’t simply include the number of page views in the posts file, but it doesn’t. In order to track your page views in a way that you can actually access them, you need to use two different plugins. The good news is that if you acted upon my article 11 Must-Have Plugins for Every WordPress Site, then you already have them. If not, you’ll need to download both of these plugins:

WordPress.com Stats Plugin
WordPress.com Popular Posts Plugin

Since the original author has already included my updates, simply installing the plugin will allow you to create your popular posts page!

1. Create a new page in WordPress. Call it something like “Top 10 Posts” or “Our Most Popular Content” or something like that.

2. Insert the following shortcode into the page. This code creates a nice top 10 list, complete with title, number of views, excerpt, and its cached for performance. Just be SURE you paste this into the WP page in HTML or the editor will screw up the HTML formatting in the format= parameter.

1. <a href="http://xtremelysocial.com/facebook/myinfo/" title="My Info on Facebook">My Info on Facebook</a> (17,249 views)<p> Fan Page Try on Facebook My Info lets you place any HTML in a custom tab on your Facebook business or fan page. It fully supports the new Facebook profile layout. Add images and links, even...</p>
2. <a href="http://xtremelysocial.com/2010/adding-a-facebook-invites-page-to-your-wordpress-site/" title="How To Allow Users To Invite Facebook Friends On Your WordPress Site">How To Allow Users To Invite Facebook Friends On Your WordPress Site</a> (15,263 views)<p>In my first article about Wordpress, I'll show you how to easily add a page to your Wordpress site that allows your users to invite their Facebook friends to check out your website. You'll first...</p>
3. <a href="http://xtremelysocial.com/2010/my-status-new-facebook-profile-publisher/" title="My Status: New Facebook Profile Publisher">My Status: New Facebook Profile Publisher</a> (6,940 views)<p>I'm very excited to announce that you can now use My Status to update your Facebook and Twitter status from within the built-in Facebook profile publisher. My Status can now be used on your Facebook...</p>
4. <a href="http://xtremelysocial.com/2010/smashing-magazine-100-free-high-quality-wordpress-themes-2010-edition/" title="Smashing Magazine: 100 Free High Quality WordPress Themes: 2010 Edition">Smashing Magazine: 100 Free High Quality WordPress Themes: 2010 Edition</a> (6,920 views)<p>   It’s hard to believe that a year has passed since our last WordPress theme collection, but there you have it — the time has come again. Once a year we feature the most useful and interesting...</p>
5. <a href="http://xtremelysocial.com/facebook/mygreetings/" title="My Greetings on Facebook">My Greetings on Facebook</a> (6,830 views)<p> Tired of having to authorize yet another poke or gifting application just to get a hug, beer, or Christmas ornament from someone? Forget about it! My Greetings is a single application that does...</p>
6. <a href="http://xtremelysocial.com/2009/facebook-roadmap-removing-profile-boxes/" title="Facebook Roadmap: Removing All Profile Boxes in Early January">Facebook Roadmap: Removing All Profile Boxes in Early January</a> (5,045 views)<p>Back in October, Facebook published a "roadmap" of changes that would be taking place then through the beginning of 2010. We have posted articles on this here, but wanted to dig deeper into an area...</p>
7. <a href="http://xtremelysocial.com/2009/my-info-how-to-show-off-your-facebook-page-on-your-personal-profile/" title="My Info: How to Show off your Facebook Page on your Personal Profile">My Info: How to Show off your Facebook Page on your Personal Profile</a> (5,041 views)<p>Facebook recently rolled out a wizard for creating a profile badge to show off your Facebook page(s). Its an image-based badge that doesn't require javascript or iframes, so it works just fine in...</p>
8. <a href="http://xtremelysocial.com/2010/mashable-10-cool-facebook-status-tips-and-tricks/" title="Mashable!: 10 Cool Facebook Status Tips and Tricks">Mashable!: 10 Cool Facebook Status Tips and Tricks</a> (4,896 views)<p>With Facebook’s ever-changing layout, and the fact that other social sites are encroaching on its real-time update strangle-hold, it’s easy to forget that there are some pretty nifty tricks you...</p>
9. <a href="http://xtremelysocial.com/2010/smashing-magazine-designing-a-facebook-fan-page-showcases-tutorials-resources/" title="Smashing Magazine: Designing A Facebook Fan Page: Showcases, Tutorials, Resources">Smashing Magazine: Designing A Facebook Fan Page: Showcases, Tutorials, Resources</a> (4,870 views)<p>   Despite its privacy issues, Facebook clearly has a key role in global Internet activity. It has become a kind of universal social network, being used for both personal and business needs. For...</p>

If you want to make changes to any of the above suggested parameters to retrieve a different number of posts or display things differently, then check out the original author’s WordPress Popular Posts Plugin FAQ.

And how would this article be complete with showing you my most popular content? Here’s out list generated directly via the above shortcode.

XtremelySocial.com Most Popular Content

1. My Info on Facebook (17,249 views)

   Fan Page Try on Facebook My Info lets you place any HTML in a custom tab on your Facebook business or fan page. It fully supports the new Facebook profile layout. Add images and links, even...

2. How To Allow Users To Invite Facebook Friends On Your WordPress Site (15,263 views)

   In my first article about Wordpress, I'll show you how to easily add a page to your Wordpress site that allows your users to invite their Facebook friends to check out your website. You'll first...

3. My Status: New Facebook Profile Publisher (6,940 views)

   I'm very excited to announce that you can now use My Status to update your Facebook and Twitter status from within the built-in Facebook profile publisher. My Status can now be used on your Facebook...

4. Smashing Magazine: 100 Free High Quality WordPress Themes: 2010 Edition (6,920 views)

     It’s hard to believe that a year has passed since our last WordPress theme collection, but there you have it — the time has come again. Once a year we feature the most useful and interesting...

5. My Greetings on Facebook (6,830 views)

   Tired of having to authorize yet another poke or gifting application just to get a hug, beer, or Christmas ornament from someone? Forget about it! My Greetings is a single application that does...

6. Facebook Roadmap: Removing All Profile Boxes in Early January (5,045 views)

   Back in October, Facebook published a "roadmap" of changes that would be taking place then through the beginning of 2010. We have posted articles on this here, but wanted to dig deeper into an area...

7. My Info: How to Show off your Facebook Page on your Personal Profile (5,041 views)

   Facebook recently rolled out a wizard for creating a profile badge to show off your Facebook page(s). Its an image-based badge that doesn't require javascript or iframes, so it works just fine in...

8. Mashable!: 10 Cool Facebook Status Tips and Tricks (4,896 views)

   With Facebook’s ever-changing layout, and the fact that other social sites are encroaching on its real-time update strangle-hold, it’s easy to forget that there are some pretty nifty tricks you...

9. Smashing Magazine: Designing A Facebook Fan Page: Showcases, Tutorials, Resources (4,870 views)

     Despite its privacy issues, Facebook clearly has a key role in global Internet activity. It has become a kind of universal social network, being used for both personal and business needs. For...

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These plugins help you control spam, optimize your site for search engines, track site visits and other metrics, allow you to display related posts throughout your site based on what each user is currently reading, provide a mobile optimized version of your site, allow users to join your site with the existing social networking and/or email ID’s, and more.

1. Add to Any – Add Social Networking Share and Email

This plugin lets you easily add links for your users to share your articles on tons of social networking sites and through email. You can choose to highlight certain social networking sites and then have all the rest under a popup windows.

2. Akismet  – Stop Comment SPAM

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”

3. All in One SEO Pack – Optimize Your Site for Search Engines

Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.

It allow you to change how the titles of your posts display, can automatically build meta descriptions and keywords based on the assigned categories and/or tags for your posts, and even lets you specifically set the post title, description, and keywords for individual posts or pages. It has some ther nice built-in SEO optimization tweaks as well.

4. Google Integration Toolkit – Track Your Site Visits and Other Valuable Metrics

Integrate Google services (Analytics, Webmaster Tools, etc.) with Your Blog.

This plugin adds the necessary Google Analytics code to your website. If you aren’t using that yet, you need to. Its the most comprehensive offering out there. It provides valuable insight into where your website traffic is coming from, how long people are staying on your site, what they are viewing and clicking on, etc.

It also supports Google Adsense ads, but I’m not using that feature on this site.

5. NuRelm Get Posts – Show Related News Articles on your WordPress Pages

Adds a shortcode tag [get_posts] to display a list of posts.

WordPress doesn’t have the ability to link page hierarchy to news article hierarchy. However, most WordPress sites would benefit from this. Most sites featuring products or services typically have related news categories for each of those products or services. Personal bloggers often do this as well in describing the various things they are passionate about. This is a very simple plugin that lets you specify a list of related posts on each of your pages.

For example, we have a WordPress page for each of our Facebook applications and also a related news category for each. With this plugin we can display related news articles for each individual Facebook application right on that applications feature page.

6. Subscribe To Comments – Let Users Subscribe to Article Comments via Email

Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.

How many times have you gone to a website and commented on something and didn’t bother to go back and see additional comments that were made. This plugin solves that problem by letting your users subscribe to get email notifications when someone else comments on the same article.

7. WordPress.com Popular Posts – Show off your most Popular Articles

Shows the most popular posts, using data collected by WordPress.com stats plugin.

Pretty much all WordPress sites, whether commercial or personal, typically have a handful of articles that are very popular and drive most the traffic to the site. Why not show these articles off to every person that looks at your site? This plugin will let you do just that. On this website, we display popular content in our footer, but you can place it in your sidebar if you want.

8. WordPress.com Stats – Track Site Visits and Other Metrics Without Leaving WordPress

Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.

You might be asking why I’m recommending this after the rave review of Google Analytics above. Well, the reason is because this plugin works right in your WordPress dashboard for immediate viewing of your popular articles, search terms, etc. Its also required for the plugin above that shows popular posts.

9. WordPress Mobile Edition – Optimize your Site for Cell Phones and Touch Phones

Show your mobile visitors a site presentation designed just for them. Rich experience for iPhone, Android, etc. and clean simple formatting for less capable mobile browsers. Cache-friendly with a Carrington-based theme, and progressive enhancement for advanced mobile browsers.

Mobile web browsing is close to exceeding desktop web browsing these days and your full WordPress site will be slow and look like garbage on a cell phone. This particular plugin even shows an optimized version for touch phones, like the iPhone, Blackberry Storm, and Andriod devices.

10. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Returns a list of related entries based on a unique algorithm for display on your blog and RSS feeds. A templating feature allows customization of the display.

Its definitely a best-practice to display related articles to the user currently reading one of your articles. The better the matching logic, the more likely the list of articles will be interesting to that reader. This plugin does a great job of matching articles and it also uses a caching system for top performance.

11. Login with Social Networking ID’s – Gigya Socialize or JanRain RPX

Since this article specifically is my list of plugins that I think every WordPress site should have, I’m recommending one of these plugins so that your users don’t need to sign up directly for “yet another site”.

Both of these plugins support logging in with Google, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and tons of other social networking and email sites. Both work quite well and will significantly increase the number of registered users on your site. I prefer the Gigya plugin, but really only because it has more advanced Facebook Connect capability than RPX and lets developers do more with the data should we chose.

12. “Bonus Plugin” — XtremelySocial Facebook Invitations Theme Template

If you are using Gigya (or any other plugin that support Facebook Connect features), you can have a nice page that lets users invite their Facebook friends to your site. Please check our our article, How To Allow Users To Invite Facebook Friends On Your WordPress Site. Its easy to install and won’t tax your server. Please note that RPX does not support true Facebook Connect features, so this won’t work with that.

Future Article: Add Social Networking Capabilities to Your WordPress Site

We will be covering plugins for more full-featured social networking functionality in a separate article. If you are chomping at the bit for this right now, here are a few plugins worth taking a look at:

• Facebook Connect WordPress Plugin by Socialable.es
• WordPress Facebook Connect Plugin unofficially developed by one of the Facebook Developers
• WordPress Multi-User (MU) with BuddyPress – Adds full-on social networking and community features
• Mingle - Adds social networking features such as friends and activity streams to your site, but does provide login capability using Facebook or other social network ID’s. 

I’m using a pretty heavily modified version of the Sociables.es plugin as it was the most comprehensive framework to start with. I tweaked the main code quite a bit and added full modules for displaying a user’s entire news stream/wall and displaying a list of all of a user’s Facebook friends. I’m trying to work with the developer to roll some of this functionality into his plugin or to work in logic that let’s myself and others add functionality to the plugin.

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You’ll first need to have Facebook Connect up and running on your site. More on that later.

What I did was make a WordPress Theme Template that will display the Facebook Invitation screen, complete with a friend selection box. It automatically pulls your website name, URL, and description to populate the Facebook invitation fields.

The reason I made this a theme template instead of a plugin, is because plugins are generally slow. WordPress loads all the code for the plugin on each page, whether the code is needed or not. This takes up valuable memory. Plus, the plugin gets called every time a page load, further cuasing overhead. With a theme template, nothing is loaded until the specific page that needs it is accessed. Some other advantages of this method are: it will automatically show your invite friends link in your page navigation, it will show up in the search engines, and it will show up in your WordPress site search as well.

To use the theme template, simply upload the template file (page-fbinvites.php) to your theme directory, then create a new page in WordPress and select “Page – Facebook Invites” as the Template.

It should work just fine for standard themes that have a header, sidebar, and footer. You must already have a Facebook connect plugin working on your site, though.

The original plugin built by a programmer at Facebook is called WP-FacebookConnect.  It allows your users to log in with Facebook and uses Facebook profile pictures automatically on comments. It also lets your users optionally post their site comments back to their Facebook profile.

The plugin that I’m using on this site is the Sociable.es Facebook Connect WordPress Plugin. It is more robust than the plugin above as it adds a nice widget to show recent visitors, your Facebook friends that use the site, and your friend’s site comments. I have further modified it to show the full Facebook stream (your home page or your friend’s wall) and to also show a full list of all your Facebook friends regardless of whether they use the site or not. I’ve reached out the original developer to see about rolling these enhancements into his plugin.

One thing to be careful of, though, with both of the above plugins: If you already have a large number of users, make sure they log in to your site first before connecting with Facebook or they will get a completely new user ID created on your site.

There are many other Facebook plugins for WordPress, so you might want to just search for some in the plugin directory. Please let us know if you find a particularly interesting one.

I’d like to thank Adam over at http://www.intafuse.com/ for asking me to help get this working on his site. It motivated me to build the theme template as the easiest way to handle this.

If you’d like to help me out, please just spread the word about my Facebook Applications and the XtremelySocial.com website. Or maybe you might be able to help me one day with some WordPress stuff. I’ve had people ask how they could donate money to help pay for my dedicated webserver, so I finally set up an easy way to donate with Paypal.

I also plan on writing more useful WordPress articles. Its a great blogging and Content Management System and I’ve learned quite a bit in building this site that I’d love to share with everyone.

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The net of the announcement is that users will no longer be able to have any custom profile boxes on their Wall or Info tab by early January. The only current functionality that will be supported is the currently available full-page custom tabs. However, these custom application tabs will shrink from 760 pixels wide to 520 pixels wide.

I do like the fact that Facebook is now sharing their roadmap ahead of time. Previously, they would simply make massive changes to the site without any real warning. Users would get miffed and complain like crazy. So this is a step in the right direction. However, they still aren’t really explaining very well the reasoning for the changes.

Without getting too “preachy”, I think removing custom profile boxes from user’s Facebook Profiles is silly. They’ve always placed very strict limitations on the number of them, where they appeared, and what could go in them. All those rules were annoying to users and developers, but at least they kept Facebook from looking like a “pimped out” MySpace profile. However, I see no legitimate reason to remove user’s ability to place small boxes of information on their Wall and Info tabs.

Facebook offers up “custom tabs” as an alternative, but we’ve always had custom tabs. My Info fully supports them and they are nice when you want to display a TON of information, but they don’t replace the need to show small bits of information to users on your main profile. This is going to hide most custom information from users unless they take the time to click through each of your custom tabs on your profile.

Also, let’s not forget that the custom profile tabs are getting smaller by about 200 pixels in width. For most people, this won’t be a huge issue, but if you have very large images or a site laid out with multiple columns of specific widths, you will need to adjust your layout.

One direction that I am considering personally, is providing the capability to have a single custom tab that displays information from all of my XtremelySocial Facebook applications. This would allow custom text from My Info combined with your recent Facebook status updates from My Status and even recent gifts given and received from My Greetings. Does this sound like a good idea? Please share your comments and ideas on this.

Here is an exact excerpt from Facebook’s developer site regarding profiles:

Description

Going forward (in the short term) application tabs will be the only way applications can integrate into profiles and Facebook Pages. We will remove profile boxes, application info sections, and the Boxes tab. We are exploring additional ways to enable developers to integrate into profiles and Pages.

Estimated Timing
Early 2010

Details
Application tabs will be the only way to integrate applications into profiles and Pages. Application tabs will shrink from 760 pixels wide (today) to 520* pixels wide to accommodate a slightly revised design. Boxes, info sections, and the Boxes tab will be removed in the near future.

In the longer term we are evaluating a number of new and interesting ways for you to help users express connections to your applications as a part of their identity. You can expect to see some of this thought emerge in future iterations of the profile.

*Note: We previously stated that profile tabs would be shrinking to 510 pixels. Our latest designs indicate they will instead be 520 pixels. We’ll keep this page updated with the latest information.

FAQs

Where will users’ profile boxes go?
Profile boxes will not exist in the near future. Application tabs will be the only way developers can integrate into the profile. If integrations on the profile are an important part of your application, we encourage you to focus development and transition to application tabs.

Will you offer an “Add Profile Tab” button, like some of the other buttons you’ve released?
Yes, we’re hoping to create something like this — most likely in early 2010.

Here is a link to the original article.

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