Tuesday, October 19, 2010

FaceBook Plans Chages to Custom Pages and FBML

In looking back over notes of things I had down that I needed to do I ran across one I had forgotten about. It seems that for those of us who have custom Fan or Landing pages on FaceBook we've got some changes looming on the horizon.

The problem is summed up in FaceBooks press release of 8/19/2010:

"By the end of this year, we will no longer allow new FBML applications to be created, so all new canvas applications and Page tabs will have to be based on IFrames and our JavaScript SDK. "

The announcement goes on to say:

"We will, however, continue to support existing implementations of the older authentication mechanism as well as FBML on Page tabs and applications. "

So I guess soon I'll be trying to figure out how these changes will affect what I'm going to do to transition from FBML to IFrames and JavaScript SDK. That sure doesn't sound like a platform that will be as easy to work with so it may mean changing from a do-it-myself project to getting some help.

And as is typical on the FB platform, there seems to be more confusion than clarity among fanpage administrators as to the near-term future. With FaceBook one thing can be certain it won't happen right at the end of the year. FaceBook is as notorious as MS when it comes to being late in meeting projected dates for releases and changes.

Anyway I guess what I'm wondering is what any of you Ampers out there are planning on doing. If I read it right we could just leave what we have in place but would that really be a good idea? I'm sure there will be lots more features and things we can do under IFrames and Java than we can using FBML.

So any thoughts on the matter? Are custom pages even worth the trouble?

3 comments:

Dianna Lambert said...

I created my landing page for my Facebook fanpages then the sizes changed and cut half of it off, now its resizing everything to get things to fit right. I think I am looking forward to a new change with the FBML since there was different languages that typical HTML but I should have know they would change it, since I just got used to the Facebook FBML lingo. :)

Frank Woodman Jr said...

Yes Dianna FaceBooks FBML isn't all that wonderful to work with so I think that when the changes come they will be for the better once we get use to them. I'm just concerned that they will be such that most people won't be able to work with them. But I'm sure lots of tools and sites will turn up to help. And as long as we don't take down the pages we have up they say they will support them.

Frank Woodman Jr said...

Thanks for the kind words Aaron hope you stop by again and if you have any topics or questions in mind let me know. I also spend a lot of time on Amplify and Twitter (@kstaxman on both)so stop by there sometime too.