I have a profile box that was created for a Facebook app -- one for a narrow page (when the box appears on the left side of your profile page) and the other for the boxes tab. The box displays the most recent blog post and a randomly selected video -- so it needs to be updated every day. The content is the same for everyone so there was no need to grab the users id and loop through a record set and update each one individually.
Anyway, I looked all over to find out how to do this and didn't seem to get any clear answers. The problem was how to run a cron when the server can't log you into Facebook to rebuild the profile pages. This required creating an infinite session -- but Facebook has changed how you do this in the past year and there are many blog posts that contradict each other on it.
After several failed attempts (the cron would work for a day and then fail), I found this recent blog post: http://www.emcro.com/blog/2009/01/facebook-infinite-session-keys-no-more/
I followed his instructions on getting an infinite session and now this is how it now looks:
$appapikey = 'app api key';
$appsecret = 'app secret key
';
$infiniteSessionkey = 'app session key';
$facebook = new Facebook($appapikey, $appsecret);
$userid = your userid;
// log into facebook using the userid and infinite session key
$facebook->api_client->user = $userid;
$facebook->api_client->session_key = $facebook_infinite_session_key;
$facebook->api_client->expires = 0;
// how that you're logged in you can call fbml_refreshRefUrl() to reset the contents
$facebook->api_client->fbml_refreshRefUrl("http://www.youyrsite.com/facebook/profile-narrow.php");
You can then just run a cron on your server that calls the page periodically to refresh the profile box:
/usr/bin/wget -O - -q -t 1 http://www.mysiteurl.com/facebook/refresh-profile-apps.php
UPDATE (Feb 3, 2009): It appears that I made it work by pure accident. If you notice the code above (which I had copied and pasted) I set the session_key to be equal to a non-existent variable:
$facebook->api_client->session_key = $facebook_infinite_session_key;
So the session key was being set to nothing. When I changed it to use the infinite session key I went through all the trouble of getting, it said that the session had expired. In fact if you comment out the line entirely it still works. I'm thinking that the trick is the following line that sets the expires to 0:
$facebook->api_client->expires = 0;
I'll have to experiment a bit more with this since its likely Facebook will plug this hole up sooner or later.
Also, a recent comment from a Facebook employee to the blog mentioned above links to a number of docs that were posted to the Facebook Developer blog that deal with what used to be called "infinite sessions" but are now "offline access":
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http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=116http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=130http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=132http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=135 The initial doc for it (mentioned in those posts):
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/New_Design_Platform_Changes#Changes_to_Session_Keys
A FAQ about changes to authentication:
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/New_Design_User_Login
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Authorizing_Applications
The easy way to get an “infinite session” is to prompt your users for offline access, as described here (and again, announced in those blog posts):
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Extended_permissions
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Unfortunately, no one updated the official docs when they made these changes, so searching for "infinite sessions" in the Wiki brings up none of this new info...
