| Version reviewed: | 3.1 |
|---|---|
| Author: | We8U |
| Price: | Free |
| Plugin URL: | Website |
Summary: If you want to use Facebook comments on your blog this is a fairly ok plugin, be sure to take your time set it up correctly though, it's somewhat complex.
There’s a couple of plugins that handle Facebook Comments for your WordPress site. Using the power of Facebook for your comment system has its merits: you immediately “inherit” the fact that people tend to use their real name there and are not as likely to spam as well as quite a few other features. Of course it comes with downsides too, like storing the data with Facebook, but a good plugin should be able to circumvent that.
This plugin has a pretty good page on WordPress.org, outlining what it does with some good screenshots. It also has a pretty decent, though a bit ugly, site for the plugin itself. The design of the admin pages uses the native styling most of the time, with some issues (re-using H3′s within a postbox, these should be H4′s, minor stuff though).
Usage
Getting the plugin to work was a bit of a hassle, mostly because it didn’t set the proper defaults and it comes with a lot of options. The explanation on how to set up an app on Facebook and how to copy over the keys needed where very well done, it was actually the fact that I had to check the lower boxes on the settings page which made sure the Facebook SDK was loaded that took me a while.
Also there were quite a few “just added” sort of mentions on the admin page, as a new user of the plugin I didn’t really feel that was helping me in any way.
Code Quality
The code is lightly commented, and seems to use the WordPress internals properly in most cases, including WP HTTP and the settings API. However, the output of the plugin contains JavaScript files half way through a page, I would appreciate it a lot more if these were in the footer. It also includes inline styles on just about anything it outputs, and forces me to define a width for my comments when it could grab that width automatically from the $content_width specified in the theme.
It’s also not using the “standard” WP_DEBUG functionality to help debug it when things go wrong but tries to set error_reporting to E_ALL, something that will probably not work properly if WP_DEBUG is false.
