Django Facebook Utils

License: MIT

The intent of this project is to provide some very basic utilities related to Facebook.

At the moment there are only two features:

• An utility that forces the update of an URL in the Facebook's share cache.
• A Context Processor that allows you to hide Facebook Open Graph Protocol <meta> tags from other User Agents.

Test it

# Download and install example
cd /tmp
virtualenv testfacebookutils
cd testfacebookutils
git clone https://github.com/caioariede/django-facebook-utils.git
source bin/activate
cd django-facebook-utils/example
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Test
./manage.py ping_facebook http://example.com --verbosity=2

Installation

pip install django-facebook-utils or install the master branch:

pip install git+http://github.com/caioariede/django-facebook-utils.git#egg=facebook_utils

How to force an URL to be updated from Facebook's cache

1. The ping_facebook command:

   python manage.py ping_facebook http://example.com

   See below How to extend the ping_facebook command to fit your needs.

2. Calling the ping_facebook shortcut:

   from facebook_utils.shortcuts import ping_facebook
   
   if ping_facebook('http://example.com'):
       print('success')
   else:
       print('fail')
   

   This shortcut will only return True or False. If you need more information to debug, you can call facebook_utils.utils.ping or use the ping_facebook command with --verbosity=2 (more verbose).

Detecting Facebook requests

1. The facebookexternalhit context processor (for templates):

   Add facebook_utils.context_processors.facebookexternalhit to the TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSOR setting in settings.py:

   TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
       #  .. other stuff
       'facebook_utils.context_processors.facebookexternalhit',
   )
   

   In the template:

   {% if facebookexternalhit %}
       <meta property="og:title" content="The Rock"/>
       <meta property="og:type" content="movie"/>
       <meta property="og:url" content="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/"/>
       <meta property="og:image" content="http://ia.media-imdb.com/rock.jpg"/>
   {% endif %}
   

2. The is_facebookexternalhit shortcut:

   from facebook_utils.shortcuts import is_facebookexternalhit
   
   def some_view(request):
       if is_facebookexternalhit(request):
           return HttpResponse('Hello, Facebook!')
       return HttpResponse('Hello visitor!')
   

How to extend the ping_facebook command

You can easily extend the ping_facebook command to fit your needs.

1. First of all, start writing your own custom command.

2. Now extends the ping_facebook command:

   from facebook_utils.management.commands import BasePingCommand
   

3. Finally, extend it to fit your needs:

   class Command(BasePingCommand):
       help = 'Ping some pages stored in database'
   
       def handle(self, **options):
           verbosity = options.get('verbosity')
           traceback = options.get('traceback')
   
           for page in Page.objects.all():
               page_url = page.get_absolute_url()
               self.do_ping(page_url, verbosity, traceback)