Facebook Page No Longer Looks Right!

[joecool]

Hi all,

I set up a facebook page for one of my webpages about a year ago and that is fine it has the tabs at the top of "discussion", "photos" etc etc.

However, I have set up a couple more yesterday for different sites and the tabs are not longer at the top, and it looks totally different.

Has facebook changed something? How do I get it to look like my other website.

Now I have a link to my wall, discussions etc on the left hand side bar only.

Hope that makes sense.

[Tommybs]

You can't. All pages are eventually going to look this way and you will have options to update your old page. If you look at their developer blog you will see there has been lots of information about this. There were even messages displayed to page owners before Christmas but they ended up delaying the rollout.

On the back of this though you can now use iFrame apps for Pages as they are deprecating FBML apps (though current installations of static FBML etc will continue to work. So far I haven't see a date for removing support)

[joecool]

Thanks Tommybs,

You can tell, I don't really follow facebook, but I plan to make it a bigger part of my business, so I have just bookmarked the developer blog you mentioned.

On that note, you mentioned they will be deprecating the FBML apps. That is useful to know because I was just going to spend a whole lot of time learning how to use them.

Going forward then, what is the best way to customize your page? What is the recommended way without using things that facebook are about to deprecate?

All I need to do is change the background and put a few images in so that the page looks unique. And perhaps make one or two other tweaks.

Any help would be gratefully received. I have put aside the whole of today and tomorrow to figure this stuff out.

(obviously I will be doing my own research especially on the blog, that was mentioned, but some on the ground advice by those that have been there and done it can sometimes be a lot more useful)

[Tommybs]

Your best bet to customize is to create iframe applications

[facebook.com...]
The developer app will allow you to create an application, then on the "Facebook Integration" tab when editing your app settings you will see how you can enter a tab name and location for your iframe. In it's most basic sense you can just create a page (max width is meant to be 520px though this still produces a horizontal scrollbar for me so I would go with 500px) that you place on your server. The visit your applications profile page and you will be able to add it to your current facebook page (I hope that makes sense).

Going forward you can add checks in to see if a user likes your page, or if they are a page admin and do more things with. You can also more deeply integrate it with the open graph and customize it to a specific users ( though they will have to authorize the application as well)

[joecool]

Hi Tommybs,

That sort of makes sense, but it also goes over the head of a novice like me.

I guess they figure if you are creating a business page, you must be able to pay for someone with some knowledge of these things to put it together for you.

I don't have that luxury I am afraid, so I will have to keep your instructions in mind and look into it in more depth.

I have never deal with "Iframes" before, and you probably know how it is, something new scares me a bit because I don't know if it will take 5 minutes to learn or 5 weeks. Such is the way for me and web design I am afraid.

Thanks for all your help