New Design Integration Guide
From Facebook Developers Wiki
Contents |
[edit] Integration Guide for the New Facebook Profile
We’re getting ready to launch some significant changes and improvements to Facebook, including a new profile for users and a new navigation bar for the Facebook site. These changes are intended to help users communicate and share information more easily with each other - on their profiles, through applications, and through News Feed.
Here are some of our goals with this project:
- Make profiles simpler and more relevant for users and their friends
- Help users represent themselves and control their profiles
- Help users communicate with their friends through content as well as through established channels
With these changes come some really exciting improvements and new opportunities with Facebook Platform. Applications will have access to a number of new features and integration points to help users interact and share more information with each other. Your applications will continue to work without changes. For example, profile boxes will continue to be supported as they are today, though in some different locations. But to take full advantage of these features and new features requires implementation changes.
Applications focused on generating real user activity and engagement should thrive with these new features and channels. Here are the key improvements:
- New forms of user-to-user communication.
- New Feed story sizes and types give you more ways to help users share content on their profiles and in News Feed.
- Publisher integration enables users to easily post content of any type on their –- and their friends' -- profiles. This is a significant upgrade over Wall attachments.
- Deeper profile integration.
- Application tabs enable users to share unique content from their favorite deep applications.
- Profile boxes enable users to express themselves in smaller forms than tabs. Users now have more placements for profile boxes including on the left-hand column as well as on the “Boxes” tab.
- Application info sections enable users to share structured content from applications on the Info tab.
- Streamlined install/login flow.
- A simplified login process should significantly increase the number of users who visit and explore your application.
- Note: Certain permissions granted on the add page such as adding a profile box or link in navigation will be migrated to new flows in the Facebook user experience.
IMPORTANT: This integration is still a work-in-progress. Anything you see in this Integration Guide is subject to change. We will provide regular updates on what has changed as this progresses.
[edit] Upgrading your Applications
This guide is intended give you a detailed overview of the changes to the Facebook profile and give you all of the information you will need to update your applications to best utilize the new features available.
We recommend that you read through this document in full and start planning and designing changes and new features for your applications. You should focus on the following sections:
- Understanding the New Integration Points: Learn the details about the new key features and how to implement them. See below for more details.
- Platform Changes: Learn about the new API calls, new FBML tags, and tags and methods that are being deprecated.
- Session Key Changes: Learn about which methods no longer require session keys.
[edit] About Migrating Your Applications
You should start designing your applications now, since you have the knowledge of the new integration points, API calls and other Platform changes. You can choose to integrate any or all of the new integration points (the new narrow column profile box, application info sections on the Info tab, the Publisher, and registering new Feed templates).
If you implement the changes at the launch – your new features will be immediately available to users when they visit their new profiles. However, if you make no changes to your application, don’t worry – it will still work and users who have installed your application and profile box will be fully migrated into the new locations on users’ profiles at the time of the launch.
For example, when users switch to the new profile design, some of their existing profile boxes may be migrated to appear in the left column of the Feed, Wall, and Info tabs on the profile. Otherwise, the profile box appears on the ”Boxes” tab instead. For more information, see Narrow Profile Boxes on the Main Profile.
The links that appear in the current Left Side Nav column will be moved to the Applications menu at the top of the profile. The Applications menu will also contain links to applications the user has recently used.
All Wall and Feed posts will be preserved. Attachments to existing Wall posts will be preserved as well. Moving forward, the Publisher will be used for creating rich content.
Later in May, developers will have access to a beta sandbox with the new profile in order to test and design your applications. There will be a short period of time where only developers will have access to the new features in order to test and deploy your applications before these changes start rolling out to users. We want to help make sure that you and your applications are ready when users start exploring and setting up their new profiles!
[edit] Check Out a Sample Application
To give you a hand with developing for the new profile design, we've made a sample PHP application. It has real examples for each of the integration points and is packaged so you can modify and run it on your servers. The README file describes how to set up and run the sample application.
[edit] Understanding the New Integration Points
The changes to Platform include the addition of new areas of the profile where you can integrate your applications and help provide this deeper user experience. These integration points include:
- Combined Feed and Wall
- A new Feed, which combines the user’s Mini-Feed with the Wall.
- Feed stories can appear in three sizes.
- A Publisher so users can publish rich content directly into their own and their friends’ Feeds. This integrates with the Feed forms we recently released.
- The Tabbed Profile
- Application tabs, so users can feature full canvas-like pages for applications they enjoy the most.
- A new profile box that can appear on the left column of the main profile (Feed, Info, Wall tabs).
- Application information sections, so users can display personalized application information on their Info tabs.
