In a recent piece of work for one of our clients we started experimenting with Drupal for Facebook, a set of modules and themes which turn Drupal into a Facebook application framework. This is a great addition for us at White Hat Media, because we love Drupal, and we love social media.
These new modules enable us to develop Drupal content and embed it within Facebook - either as native FBML or in an iFrame….which is pretty cool. This means it is possible to have a full-power, turbo charged Drupal website within your Facebook application or customized tab, meaning endless possibilities for your custom content.
Drupal.org proclaims “With Drupal for Facebook, you can harness all the power of Drupal in you Facebook App. If you already have content in Drupal, you can expose it on Facebook.” – Excellent stuff!
The application we’ve developed exposes existing videos on a profile tab and links through to the main site. This was a good start but we wanted to push it further. By linking from the tab through to an iframe app we were able to play the videos within Facebook, and since the videos are all hosted on cloud servers we have a really powerful system.
An iframe, put simply, is a window into your website. It works similar to the <img> tag, only instead of displaying an image on the page, it displays another web page. In this case the window to the webpage was within Facebook. Any action carried out within the iframe area reflects on the external site, as they are one and the same. So, if you made a comment on a video which appears within the iframe on Facebook, the comment would appear with the video on the external website which the iframe is looking into.
Once we had the site displaying in iframes we could quickly harness all the functionality of the site within Facebook, like voting, commenting, tweeting and so on - but it gets even better. So far we’ve only hooked Drupal and Facebook together in one direction - we’ve pushed Drupal content onto Facebook, but what about pulling Facebook data back into Drupal? This is where Facebook Connect comes in. Now with the click of a button the user can allow us to connect to their Facebook account. So now we can display a list of their friends to invite to the app, and we can post to their wall when they vote and much more...
Essentially, we can harness all the power of Facebook from within Drupal.
This is a really useful feature to have, because you can publish dynamic, feature rich content to the biggest social network on the planet. There could be the possibility for users to view and purchase your products, view your videos, converse on your message boards and comment on your photos on your website, through Facebook. With over 6,000 Drupal modules to play with the only limitation is your imagination.
What’s doubly brilliant about it is that it doesn’t detract from your website traffic, it increases it! As the Facebook iframe is a “portal” into your Drupal site, any action carried out within it counts towards your site traffic also, so if conversions are made within your Facebook app they are made within your website - and that means they are all tracked by your analytics package - Perfect! We know sometimes users can be too lazy to visit your site, so if you can present elements of your site to them within Facebook you won’t lose their custom or attention.
We’re looking forward to developing our knowledge and experience in Drupal for Facebook, and would love to hear what you think of this module if you have used it for any similar projects.
(I would like to thank our Drupal whizz Matt Terry for his technical input on this blog post, without his help I may not have made much sense! Thanks mate. Wordpress, you need to have the option for multiple authors!)
