The AfterParty

Just finished working on Facebook Connect for cluboholic.com. Its a bit overdue, had it in the works for quite some time now but unfortunately it took me a lot longer than I expected. 

For those who haven’t heard what Facebook connect is yet, its basically a way of getting users who are already signed up on Facebook to have access as registered users on third party websites, and in this case on Cluboholic.com. Of course it doesn’t just end there, there’s a lot more to it; for example, as a user you can see which of your facebook friends are cluboholic members and what they are doing on the site, have your avatar change as you change your photo on facebook, post updates from cluboholic.com on you facebook wall etc. There’s endless possibilities but for now only the basic connectivity functionality is there.

You’ll notice in the forum the  buttons. There’s two possibilities, if you are not already registered to cluboholic.com, you have to click on the button, and a facebook-style popup will show up explaining that you have to login to facebook (or just connect if already logged in). Then you’ll be forwarded to a new page where you are given two options, to either become a user of cluboholic.com with your full name as it is on facebook or with a nickname that you can enter. Then you have to enter a password that you will be using with cluboholic.com in case you want to login indenpentandly from facebook (note that even though it can be it doesn’t have to be the same as your facebook password). Thats all, you’re done, click Connect and you’ll be able to use all cluboholic.com’s registered user features as long as you’re logged into facebook.

If you’re already a registered user of cluboholic.com and your email address is the same on both sites then you can link the accounts together and whenever you visit cluboholic.com while logged in on facebook you’ll be automatically logged in here automatically. The benefit of this is not obvious for now but it will be as soon as more facebook related features get implemented. 

The whole system can be considered to be in Beta so if you encounter any problems please let me know!

For anyone who might be interested in the more technical stuff:
Cluboholic.com’s user system is based around its PHPBB3 forum, one of the most popular forum systems available but unfortunately lacks Facebook Connect functionality.  After some googling around I discovered that till now no one managed or tried to get Facebook Connect to work with PHPBB3 and yet while there’s been a lot requests for it. This is what basically caused the delay in implementing Facebook Connect on cluboholic.com. The main issue when I’m working on things like this is to ensure that any changes made to the current system won’t break future upgrades which means most work has to be done externally. The way it is done now, absolutely no changes where made to the PHPBB database, and everything was done with changes to two template files and the addition of one more include on the main page files of PHPBB. Later if i have the time i’ll post here full info of how its done cause i’m sure there’s people out there who’d like to have it too.