How to show facebook feed messages from my site without access_token?

Question

I have a facebook site (site, not profil wall) and would like to display the message feed on a webpage. This already works fine if I use

https://graph.facebook.com/177610425663218/feed

But I need an access_token for this. Using the Graph Explorer I can generate a temporary token.

I know I can create an OAuth but I don't want every visitor of my webpage to login into facebook just to see the feeds. There must be another way... Maybe using PHP instead of Javascript?

Solution 1

I don't think you can do it without the access token anymore, but check my answer here for detailed steps on getting one and retrieving the feed you want.

Solution 2

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/ provides a list of all plugins that you can embed. However, this does not work if you want to display feed to non-fb-logged-in users.

To solved your problem - have a server side script that accesses this feed and displays it. If this feed is from a FB page, then you will need an access token with "manage_pages" permissions. Using that, you can get the contents using the following (PHP) code:

$response=file_get_contents("https://graph.facebook.com/".$id."/feed&access_token=".$facebook_access_token);
$response_array=json_decode($response,true);
// $id: Page ID

You can also customize this query by adding pagination parameters like since,limit,until etc. Please refer to https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/ for documentation.

This approach allows you the following advantages:

• Your Access Token is safe on your server and not visible to public.
• Your feed can be seen by even a non-logged in user.
• You can customize the look and feel of your feed since you control the UI.

Disadvantages:

• Needs you to code and actively maintain a piece of code that does nothing except act like a proxy. Everytime FB changes the structure of it's object, you will need to change this code.

Solution 3

You can use https://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=<your-page-id>&format=json This returns a json object and requires no access token.

You can also use different formats such as xml and rss20.

Hope this helps.

Solution 4

Although this question has already been answered. I hope this might help someone else.

I've been developing a plugin for an inhouse CMS that needed to pull a facebook feed straight from JUST the users url. This is what I ended up with.

$url = 'url_pulled_from_database';
$url = str_replace('http://www.', 'http://graph.', $url);
$get_id = file_get_contents($url);
$get_id = json_decode($get_id, true);   
$fbID = $get_id['id'];

//THEN CALL THE FUNCTION        
fb_parse_feed($fbID, $maxnumber);

I cant take credit for the fb_parse_feed function, but you can find it here https://gist.github.com/banago/3864515

Once implemented, it worked like a charm on any public page just by using the url.

Solution 5

doing this in windows 8 store app, this seem to work

url = "https://graph.facebook.com/me?fields=feed&access_token=" + fbtoken;

View more solutions

Comments

[Shreeni]

If you have only one or two pages and want to quickly configure things, you can just go to Graph API Explorer (developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer) and generate one from there. If you do not wish to use this, then you need an app that will get it from a user using FB.login (developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/javascript/FB.login) or some such FB-Authentication mechanism.

[PiTheNumber]

Thanks. I already tried the Graph API Explorer but the token I get there is only temporary: "Error validating access token: Session has expired at unix time...". I need a long time token...

[PiTheNumber]

This is great! Do you have any documentation for this API?

[PiTheNumber]

This is the same as Shreeni proposed and it works well if you get an access token but Nick Lucas is nicer because it works without token. Still +1 for your effort and welcome to Stackoverflow :)

[MicFin]

That would be very helpful for me. Can you show example of how to use that on a public page. Say for this page? facebook.com/JulianEdelman as example