WST Facebook

wst-facebook is a small framework for facebook applications based on PHP5. It's not intended to be "FacebookOnRails" but to offer a meaningful structure and some helpful conventions to speed-up development while still being easy to modify.

Dependencies

• Smarty
• adodb
• Facebook PHP Client Library

Documentation

File Structur

• Sample App
  • index.php - handels all incomming requests
  • FacebookApp.php - contains the logic of your Facebook app
  • views - contains the views for ever Action Methods
    • c - compiled smarty views (must be writeable by your Webserver)
  • logs - if logging is enabled it contains the logfile (must be writeable by your Webserver)
• WST - contains the WST-Facebook Framework class
• lib - contains all external libraries (Adodb, Smarty,facebook API)

sampleApp Setup

1. Preparations

• Read Creating a Platform Application
• Create an app on Facebook

2. Configure

There is no external config file as there is not much configuration needed. All configuration is done directly in index.php.

Configure the Facebook Client Library

Basically you only need to insert the API key and the secret of your Facebook application. As it is very useful to sometimes switch of the Facebook proxying for development purposes you can do so by setting $fb['needed'] to false.

If your application requires the user to be logged in (i.e. for throwing stuff into his datastore) just enable $fb['user_login'].

Configure your database connection

The configuration of a database connection is completely up to you. In case you need it, enable $db['needed']. If you do so there will be a $this->db object using the ADOdb database library to allow accessing your database.

For informations on how to work with ADOdb please have a look at their website at adodb.sourceforge.net.

What else?

As setting a timezone is madatory scince PHP 5.3 this is where you can define your application's date_default_timezone_set('Europe/Vienna');.

3. Implement

FacebookApp.php shows how to implement your own Facebook app using wst-facebook. You set up a class which implements the abstract class WST_Facebook. This class can be seen as the controller component of your application.

For each action you have to set up a public method which ends with ...Action(), so that an action called ìndex would be defined through a method called indexAction().

Within the action you are free to do whatever has to be done to generate the output. You can assign variables for being used within the Smarty template by calling $this->view->assign("key", "value").

Each action must - or at least is intended to - end with calling $this->render(). This triggers Smarty to generate the template and display it. By convention wst-facebook expects templates to reside in /path/to/your/app/views/, ending with *.tpl and reflecting the name of the current action. So if your action is called index there has to be a template called index.tpl in the views folder.

By default all templates are cached in /path/to/your/app/views/c.

4. Run

ìndex.php is the Frontcontroller. This means that all requests are handled here. By convention a parameter called action is expected. If there is none the action is set to index by default.

If a non-existing action is requested an exception is thrown and the error action is triggered as a fallback. This means that the methos errorAction() is executed and the error.tpl template is rendered.