December 22, 2009 
A fantastic new plugin has been released that is going to be very useful to many WPMU site owners. It’s called Faux Facebook Connect and it allows Facebook users to easily comment on WPMU blogs. The plugin is mainly JavaScript and provides single sign on and avatars. The great thing about it is that it doesn’t change anything in the database or add any users. Plugin author Thorsten Ott credits Beau Lebens for the initial idea, and you can visit his site for a more technical explanation of how the plugin operates. I’m going to show you how to use it on your WPMU site.
Installation is quite simple:
1. Upload the faux-facebook-connect folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. Visit Settings=>Faux Facebook in your wp-admin area and follow the instructions on that page.
WordPress MU Integration involves a couple of extra steps:
To make sure the script loads out of a theme context or other urls use the fauxfb_plugin_url filter as shown below:
add_filter( 'fauxfb_plugin_url', 'fauxfb_plugin_url' ); function fauxfb_plugin_url() { return get_bloginfo('template_url') . '/plugins/faux-facebook-connect'; }
Placing this code in the functions.php of your theme would cause the script to search in the plugins folder of the template for the faux-facebook-connect folder.
It could be activated by putting the following line in your functions.php file just after this call.
require_once( 'plugins/faux-facebook-connect/faux-facebook-connect.php' );
Make sure to follow the Frontend Setup Procedure in the settings page to get the buttons showing up on your site.
If you’re not intimidated by getting your own Facebook API key, go ahead and give this plugin a try! I’m sure the author would appreciate your feedback.
Thanks!! Just yesterday I was trying to make up my mind about using 2 standalone WordPress installs over WPMU because I wanted to use FB Connect and Disqus, but I can live with this for now. My only qualm, since this plugin doesn’t add users to your database you kinda miss out on future “marketing” to your sites users. Capturing an email address for some could be a deal breaker. Or am I misunderstanding?
You’re understanding correctly. I think this plugin serves the purpose of getting people to be able to comment easily on your WPMU site, not necessarily for adding users.
I’m watching this space carefully, especially as FB is about to release user credentials and emails to 3rd parties (with FB user permission) – very soon. (Mid-Jan now, but the timeline is shifting.)
Faux FB looks like a great plugin, but as Dave mentions above, it’s the marketing aspects of using the next generation of FB Connect that will surely take it’s use to the next level.
Do you know of any other plugins apart from the Andy Peatling FB Connect plugin that can perform this for Buddypress/MU?
Also, are you aware of any resources that give a KISS approach to configuring the FB settings for 3rd party developers. Apart from the FB Developer pages.
I’m more of an integrator rather than a developer :) It seems simple enough to just set up for an API code, but what about if you want to go a little further with features such as wall to wall post sharing?
thanks
Paul
This is cool. Now if only the FB-Connect plugin for user registration would work for me. I get a page under construction error every time I try.
i must check it first. it brings me a lot of idea. thank you :)
Has anybody got any experience of this plugin vs. the Andy Peatling one – would be interested in your feedback on the differences. Thanks.
Sounds like lots of work for people running WPMU installs with a _lot_ of themes…
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Thats some great information there, very informative thank you.