Lightquick Web Design - High Quality, Low Cost

You must read the requirements section at the bottom of this page before enabling this mambot or your front end will white-screen.

If you have not enabled FB buttons before I recommend you read all of this and then familiarise yourself with the tooltips for each configuration option. Some of the FB configuration is really not straight forward and it differs according to method used.

It isn't a very simple process but you can blame that on Facebook! They keep changing the methods required to add a FB like button.

This mambot looks complicated because it deals with all three methods currently in operation.  In truth it is not that difficult so press on...

This Mambot was created by Dean Beedell in 2011 to provide that missing facebook linking functionality that you've found so hard to find for Joomla 1.0.15. This Mambot allows you to add a facebook button to content items as well as for Virtuemart and Jdownloads. You can add two types of link, the old share.php method which provides the white F in a blue box (where you have type in some text to share) or the new Facebook iframe method of "like this" where you just click on the button. Each has advantages over the other. The old method is easier to configure and works on all pages, the new methods are not so good for blogs and the xfbml method takes a little more configuration. They also don't work so well on blog pages consisting of a number of individual articles. You'll have to test and see. This mambot will automatically add a Facebook button link at the top of the page which can be positioned left or right. It will also generate the open:graph tags that are required for the current Facebook API. As of today it has been tested on live Joomla 1.0.15 and Joostina 1.2 sites (Joostina is Joomla 1.0.15 on steroids), and mostly everything works - but if it doesn't please don't complain, simply raise a bug by contacting me on the website. I will fix it.

As well as placing the icon on the top of the page this mambot will also allow you to add the same button anywhere you like on a content page. Just place { facebook }{ /facebook } in the content in HTML code view and turn manual links to ON. You can even replace the URL with a hard-coded URL. Just place it between the { facebook }{ /facebook }tag as this example: { facebook }http://www/lightquick.co.uk{ /facebook } and turn replacement URLs to ON.

There are three methods:

OldShare - The old style of Facebook share is the white F in a blue box. This functionality is now obsolete and although it still works, Facebook may some day in the future turn this functionality off. So, why do we provide this? because the old functionality is easy for you to implement (you just turn it on) and you won't have to worry about any further configuration. Some people just like it. It also works better on blog pages consisting of a number of individual articles as it does not require the use of og: tags (you can only have one set of og: tags per page).

Iframe - The iframe method is current and you can switch from the old method to the new as you require or when Facebook make the old method redundant. Note that the iFrames method is not always compatible with all browsers. If you use the iframe method then you will need to enable and configure the facebook OG tags as per your requirement (the Open Graph tags are the means by which Facebook identifies your site). This mambot provides some easy methods for entering the OG information and some clever ways of getting the details automatically from the installed applications as required. The mambot also changes some of  the og:tags dynamically as page content changes, namely:

Installation Procedures.

Installation is easy and straight-forward. Install the mambot and make the changes to joomla.php as detailed below. If you want to have the FB button appear on virtuemart and jdownload items then follow the appropriate instructions below, otherwise ignore them.

Requirements:

You must make the following change to the following file before enabling this mambot. If you do not make the changes then your site will give you a white-screen from the front end.

/public_html/includes/joomla.php

Several changes have been made here to allow creation on new meta property Open Graph tags, the use of which allows Facebook to identify your site.
This file has been included as part of the package.

Using your control panel file manager navigate to to this folder:

/public_html/includes

Then backup the original joomla.php by renaming it to:

joomla.php.1

This will save the original file just in case you make any mistakes.

For Joomla 1.0.13:

Extract the file named joomla.1.0.13.php and rename it to   joomla.php.

For Joomla 1.0.15:

Extract the file named joomla.1.0.15.php and rename it to   joomla.php.

Extract the file named joostina.php and rename it to   joomla.php.

Place the supplied file into this folder /public_html/includes/ on your Joomla installation. Any errors report here .

Ensure you enable the plugin after installing it.

Enable it by clicking on Mambots >> Site Mambots

Facebook on individual Virtuemart products.  

Backup the original file and then place the new one in this folder: /public_html/administrator/components/com_virtuemart/html

Find this line:
$template = preg_replace("/{vm_lang:([^}]*)}/ie", "\$VM_LANG->\\1", $template);

And you will see that this code has been added immediately beneath:

//.01 Code added by Dean Beedell to call joomla plugins STARTS

global $_MAMBOTS;
$_MAMBOTS->loadBotGroup( 'content' );
$tmp_row = new stdClass();
$tmp_params = new mosParameters('');
$tmp_row->text = $template;
$_MAMBOTS->trigger( 'onPrepareContent', array( &$tmp_row, &$tmp_params ), true );
$template = $tmp_row->text;

//.01 Code added by Dean Beedell to call joomla plugins ENDS

Facebook on individual Jdownload items.  

Unwanted additional Facebook buttons appear in modules.  

Joomla 1.0 allows mambots to operate on custom HTML modules with the result that content mambots are also displayed in custom HTML modules. This means that the facebook buttons will pop up in a variety of module positions around your site. If this is unwanted functionality then you need to disable buttons for module positions. This is a configuration option in the mambot. As a result the extra FB buttons will disappear.

Facebook App. ID

To use the iframe/xfbml methods you may need to obtain an Facebook app id. This allows you to link your site to the advanced features of Facebook. To obtain a Facebook app. id. you need to go here:

https://developers.facebook.com/app

The first thing to do is to register for a developer account. When that is complete visit your main developer page and press the "create new app" button. You need to create a separate app id for each site that you want to link to. The sites that you connect to Facebook will be listed on the left hand side.

The result of this process is the app id. that you enter into the app. id. field  of both the Facebook mambot and the JSDK mambot.

Facebook Errors.

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