Notice: Sharing Options to Facebook are Changing

This notice relates to the following platforms: WordPress.com, VIP Go

Facebook announced that starting August 1, 2018, third-party tools can no longer share posts automatically to Facebook Profiles. This affects Publicize, the tool for WordPress.com and Jetpack-powered sites that connects your site to major social media platforms (like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook).

If a user on your site has connected a Facebook Profile to your site, Publicize will no longer be able to share posts to a Facebook Profile. On the other hand, nothing will change if you have a Facebook Page connected to your site — all your content should still appear directly on Facebook via Publicize. (Not sure what the difference is between a Page and a Profile? Here’s Facebook’s explanation.)

If your site is connected to a Facebook Profile, and would like to followers to continue seeing posts, you have two options:

  • Your user can go the manual route: once they publish a new post, copy its URL and share the link in a new Facebook post.
  • You can convert the Facebook Profile to a Page.

In the meantime, the Publicize feature of Jetpack and WordPress.com (and social media scheduling tools) will continue to be available to you for posting to Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms.

If you have any questions, please open a support ticket, and we’ll be happy to help.

Facebook Instant Articles v3.0 now available!

A new version of the Facebook Instant Articles plugin has been committed to the shared plugins repository. V3.0 is a feature and bugfix release and is intended to replace v2.11 and includes;

  • Fix versioning – use WP style
  • Ignore hyperlinks with a #
  • Allow filtering of post types used in the feed
  • Use v2.6 of the Facebook API
  • Coding standards & whitespace fixes
  • Load Facebook SDK over HTTPS
  • Avoid crawling of 404s
  • Replace social embeds with interactives
  • Use submission ID to check status in the admin
  • Fix over-zealous escaping

We encourage all VIPs using Facebook Instant Articles to upgrade to this version by specifying the version parameter of `wpcom_vip_load_plugin()` like so;

wpcom_vip_load_plugin( 'facebook-instant-articles', 'plugins', '3.0' );

This also means that we are now deprecating v1 and intend to remove the plugin in one month, on 9th August. v2.11 will remain available for those who want to use it, but we strongly encourage you to upgrade to v3.0.

As we approach the removal date for v1 we’ll contact any VIPs still loading that version.

If you have any questions please open a ticket where we’ll be happy to assist you transition to the newest version.

Facebook Instant Articles v2 now available!

We’re really excited to announce that version 2 of the Facebook Instant Articles plugin has been committed to the shared plugins repository. V2 is a big feature release and a significant rewrite, largely by the team at Facebook who we’re delighted to have worked with on this update.

Changes include;

We encourage all VIPs using Instant Articles to upgrade to this version by specifying the version parameter of wpcom_vip_load_plugin() like so;

wpcom_vip_load_plugin( ‘facebook-instant-articles’, ‘plugins’, ‘2.11’ );

If you have any questions please open a ticket where we’ll be happy to assist you transition to the newest version.

Pull requests are also welcome on the Github repository.

Customizing the Sharing Experience

Two features we wanted to highlight that are available to VIPs to improve the sharing experience for your users.

Open Graph

About a month ago, we enabled Open Graph Tags for all public blogs on WordPress.com. Open Graph tags make it easier for you to control what information Facebook, Google+, and other services display when users share posts from your site. We excluded VIP sites as many of you already have custom code that handles these tags.

If you don’t already have Open Graph implemented on your site or want to trim some code from your theme(s), you can add the following helper function to your functions.php and the tags will be auto-generated for you.

wpcom_vip_enable_opengraph();

If you’d like a closer look at the code that generates the tags, you can find it here: https://gist.github.com/1196068. (We made sure to sprinkle some extra BBQ sauce for handling Gallery images and Author pages!)

If you’d like to fine-tune the output of the tags, you can filter jetpack_open_graph_tags and modify the array that’s passed in.

Here’s what this post looks like (with Open Graph enabled) when sharing on Facebook and Google+:

Twitter /via

Customize your Twitter /via

If you’re using the built-in WordPress.com Sharing buttons, we’ve added a helper function to customize the “/via” tag appended to Tweets. Just add the following to your functions.php and change the argument to the username you want attributed.

wpcom_vip_sharing_twitter_via( 'automattic' );

If you want to disable the “/via”, just pass in false

wpcom_vip_sharing_twitter_via( false );

If you need help implementing either of these, please get in touch.

Have you taken our VIP Services Customer Satisfaction Survey yet? We’d love your input.