Ahsanity

To publish news feeds, older applications used one of the following methods: feed.publishStoryToUser, feed.publishActionOfUser, and feed.publishTemplatizedAction. But due to the changes in the New Facebook, these methods no longer work. As a result, these applications are only able to publish news feeds if the user is still using the old facebook. But, when used in the new UI, no feeds are published.

While trying to make some of our legacy apps to work in the new facebook, I found that doing it is not really a very difficult task. But, unfortunately I didnt find good docs that explained the procedure clearly, and easily. Here I will try to explain the procedure with a simple example.

Suppose, in our legacy app, we have the following code to publish a news feed:

<?php
 
...
 
$facebook->api_client->feed_publishTemplatizedAction(
    '{actor} has bought {item} from The Wonderful App',
    '{"item": "' . $item_name .'"}'
);
 
...
 
?>

Now the above code will publish a simple one line news feed in the old facebook. But if the users are in the new one, this code will not result in any feed publishing at all. To make it publish feed in both the old and new Facebook, we just need to follow these 4 steps:

1. Update Facebook library classes

The first thing that we need to do is to update the facebook library classes. Download the latest code, and replace the files “facebook.php” and “facebookapi_php5_restlib.php” with the newly downloaded versions. In the class FacebookRestClient (facebookapi_php5_restlib.php), we will notice the following new methods:

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  public function &feed_registerTemplateBundle($one_line_story_templates,
                                               $short_story_templates = array(),
                                               $full_story_template = null)
  {
    $one_line_story_templates = json_encode($one_line_story_templates);
 
    if (!empty($short_story_templates)) {
      $short_story_templates = json_encode($short_story_templates);
    }
 
    if (isset($full_story_template)) {
      $full_story_template = json_encode($full_story_template);
    }
 
    return $this->call_method('facebook.feed.registerTemplateBundle',
                              array('one_line_story_templates' => $one_line_story_templates,
                                    'short_story_templates' => $short_story_templates,
                                    'full_story_template' => $full_story_template));
  }
 
  public function &feed_getRegisteredTemplateBundles()
  {
    return $this->call_method('facebook.feed.getRegisteredTemplateBundles', array());
  }
 
  public function &feed_getRegisteredTemplateBundleByID($template_bundle_id)
  {
    return $this->call_method('facebook.feed.getRegisteredTemplateBundleByID',
                              array('template_bundle_id' => $template_bundle_id));
  }
 
  public function &feed_deactivateTemplateBundleByID($template_bundle_id)
  {
    return $this->call_method('facebook.feed.deactivateTemplateBundleByID',
                              array('template_bundle_id' => $template_bundle_id));
  }
 
  public function &feed_publishUserAction($template_bundle_id, $template_data,
                                          $target_ids='', $body_general='')
  {
    return $this->call_method('facebook.feed.publishUserAction',
                              array('template_bundle_id' => $template_bundle_id,
                                    'template_data' => $template_data,
                                    'target_ids' => $target_ids,
                                    'body_general' => $body_general));
 
 
 
 
 
 
  }

Here we will be using two from the above new methods: feed.registerTemplateBundle and feed.publishUserAction.

2. Add asterisks(*) before and after token names in the template

The next thing that we need to know is to add asterisks(*) before and after any token that we use in our template. So our new template will look like this:

"{*actor*} has bought {*item*} from The Wonderful App"

I am still not sure why we need to do this, but the docs says so.

3. Register the template bundle and get the Template Bundle ID

This is the most critical, and boring, part of the whole process. In the new API, we need to register all templates that we plan to use. Once a template is registered, the API returns a Template Bundle ID that is needed to publish a news feed template. To register a template, and get a Template Bundle ID, we need to call the method feed.registerTemplateBundle. This has to be done separately, and before we start using the template. Here is a simple script that we can add to our App to register our template:

<?php
 
$template = "{*actor*} has bought {*item*} from The Wonderful App";
echo $facebook->api_client->feed_registerTemplateBundle($template);
 
?>

When we execute the script, it will print the Template Bundle ID for the template. We will need this ID later, to publish feeds based on this template. Please note that the above script is a very simplified version, and is only useful to register our example template. Also, this assumes that we are only interested to register one line story for the feeds. There are two other types of story (short and full) supported by the new API that we are ignoring here, for simplicity’s sake. We will only need to execute the script ones to get the Template Bundle ID. Lets assume that our Template Bundle ID is 73684790233. We will need this to publish the story.

4. Use feed.publishUserAction instead of feed.publishTemplatizedAction

We are almost done! All we need to do now is to use our Template Bundle ID to publish the story. But instead of using feed.publishTemplatizedAction to publish the feed, we will use the new method feed.publishUserAction as shown below:

<?php
 
...
 
$facebook->api_client->feed_publishUserAction(
    73684790233,
    '{"item": "' . $item_name .'"}'
);
 
...
 
?>

Notice, we didnt need to pass the template. Instead we passed the Template Bundle ID that we got earliar, when we registered the template. We also passed the data, just like before.

Please note that this is a simplified version of the process that we need to follow to make feeds publishing work in apps that still uses the old API. For a more detailed understanding please refer the following:

• New Design Feed Wall
• Creating Feed Stories
• New Design Platform Changes

Thats all guys! I hope this is useful. Thanks for reading.