How to show facebook feed messages from my site without access_token?

Question

I have a facebook site (site, not profil wall) and would like to display the message feed on a webpage. This already works fine if I use

https://graph.facebook.com/177610425663218/feed

But I need an access_token for this. Using the Graph Explorer I can generate a temporary token.

I know I can create an OAuth but I don't want every visitor of my webpage to login into facebook just to see the feeds. There must be another way... Maybe using PHP instead of Javascript?

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 12 '12 at 08:34

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/ provides a list of all plugins that you can embed. However, this does not work if you want to display feed to non-fb-logged-in users.

To solved your problem - have a server side script that accesses this feed and displays it. If this feed is from a FB page, then you will need an access token with "manage_pages" permissions. Using that, you can get the contents using the following (PHP) code:

$response=file_get_contents("https://graph.facebook.com/".$id."/feed&access_token=".$facebook_access_token);
$response_array=json_decode($response,true);
// $id: Page ID

You can also customize this query by adding pagination parameters like since,limit,until etc. Please refer to https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/ for documentation.

This approach allows you the following advantages:

Your Access Token is safe on your server and not visible to public.
Your feed can be seen by even a non-logged in user.
You can customize the look and feel of your feed since you control the UI.

Disadvantages:

Needs you to code and actively maintain a piece of code that does nothing except act like a proxy. Everytime FB changes the structure of it's object, you will need to change this code.

If you have only one or two pages and want to quickly configure things, you can just go to Graph API Explorer (https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer) and generate one from there. If you do not wish to use this, then you need an app that will get it from a user using FB.login (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/javascript/FB.login/) or some such FB-Authentication mechanism. — Shreeni, Mar 12 '12 at 09:24
Thanks. I already tried the Graph API Explorer but the token I get there is only temporary: "Error validating access token: Session has expired at unix time...". I need a long time token... — PiTheNumber, Mar 12 '12 at 09:45

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered May 02 '13 at 05:25

3

You can use https://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=<your-page-id>&format=json This returns a json object and requires no access token.

You can also use different formats such as xml and rss20.

Hope this helps.

answered May 02 '13 at 05:25

Nick Lucas

317
2
5

This is great! Do you have any documentation for this API? – PiTheNumber May 03 '13 at 06:40

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 20 '13 at 00:03

Although this question has already been answered. I hope this might help someone else.

I've been developing a plugin for an inhouse CMS that needed to pull a facebook feed straight from JUST the users url. This is what I ended up with.

$url = 'url_pulled_from_database';
$url = str_replace('http://www.', 'http://graph.', $url);
$get_id = file_get_contents($url);
$get_id = json_decode($get_id, true);   
$fbID = $get_id['id'];

//THEN CALL THE FUNCTION        
fb_parse_feed($fbID, $maxnumber);

I cant take credit for the fb_parse_feed function, but you can find it here https://gist.github.com/banago/3864515

Once implemented, it worked like a charm on any public page just by using the url.

That would be very helpful for me. Can you show example of how to use that on a public page. Say for this page? https://www.facebook.com/JulianEdelman as example — MicFin, Aug 23 '14 at 03:40

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered May 07 '13 at 05:56

1

doing this in windows 8 store app, this seem to work

url = "https://graph.facebook.com/me?fields=feed&access_token=" + fbtoken;

answered May 07 '13 at 05:56

ben borja jr

11
1

This is the same as [Shreeni](http://stackoverflow.com/a/9663836/956397) proposed and it works well if you get an [access token](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/page/#page_access_tokens) but [Nick Lucas](http://stackoverflow.com/a/16330887/956397) is nicer because it works without token. Still +1 for your effort and welcome to Stackoverflow :) – PiTheNumber May 07 '13 at 06:55

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:27

1

I don't think you can do it without the access token anymore, but check my answer here for detailed steps on getting one and retrieving the feed you want.

edited May 23 '17 at 10:27

Community

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answered Oct 28 '15 at 18:21

craned

2,991
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How to show facebook feed messages from my site without access_token?

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