Power a Facebook Page using Wordpress - Aaron Lumsden | Aaronlumsden.com Aaron Lumsden

Power a Facebook Page Using WordPress Written by Aaron Lumsden on 01 May 2012

This month saw me release my first premium tut for the tuts+ network. In it I show how you can power your Facebook page using word press

Sample from the Premium Tut

In this Premium tutorial I’ll be showing you how you can power a Facebook page using WordPress as a CMS. I’ll take you through the design styles and coding, before showing you how to install and implement the whole thing into Facebook with ease.

Why Choose a Blog As a Facebook Page?

If you’ve reached this stage of the tut then I’m presuming that most of you already have or are intending to have a WordPress setup as your website. The benefits of using WordPress as a content management system can often far outweigh those of a custom written one. For the majority of sites WordPress is more than substantial for their needs and with a little bit of clever programming can be extended to create more complex sites from apps to full eCommerce sites.

Most web-savvy folk are aware of the benefits of having a Facebook page for a brand, a portfolio or a business. If you are’t then I’m guessing you won’t be reading this..
Facebook describe:

“A Facebook Page gives a voice to any public figure or organization to join the conversation with their audience on Facebook.”

What better way to engage in conversation with your audience than incorporating a blog into your Facebook page, and what better blog to incorporate into your Facebook page, than the king of blog CMS’ WordPress?

By incorporating a blog into your page you are able to create a steady regular news stream for your audience, gauge feedback, ultimately keep people revisiting your page and add another platform to your online presence.

The Structure

Before we get stuck into the tut, I just thought I’d give you a quick overview as to how this all fits together. There are basically three entities within our Facebook page blog app that we need in order for it to work. They are:

A Facebook Page
A Facebook Page App
A WordPress Setup on our own domain and hosting

All of these three entities need to be able to communicate with each other. We can achieve this by firstly creating our WordPress blog site on our hosting/server. What we’re building is nothing particularly special but simply a specially adapted WordPress theme that will be designed to fit the 520px constraints of a Facebook page. This could in effect run as its own website, albeit a very thin one at only 520px wide.

The second step is to tell our ‘Facebook page app’ to pull in the data from our own domain into Facebook.

Lastly we setup our Facebook page to display our Facebook app, which is ultimately the WordPress site.

Setting Up The Facebook Page

Now that you have a better understanding of how all the pieces of this jigsaw fit together, let’s jump in and start getting set up.

The first thing that needs to be done is to set up a folder on our own hosting/server that is going to be holding the Facebook page content (ie WordPress). I’ve setup a folder on mine called “wordpressfacebookpage” but you can call yours whatever you like. Just make sure that you know the url for this folder as we’ll need it in the next step of the tut.

So let’s jump straight in and set up our Facebook page. If you’re lucky you’ll be able to reserve the direct name of your brand, but if for whatever reason your chosen name has gone then it can often be a good idea to perhaps add another word to your brand name. Some pages sometimes opt for adding words like “Official” to the end of their page name but it’s entirely up to you in what direction you want to take your page name.

Firstly we need to create a Facebook page which can be setup by going to

https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

Choose the category that best suits your page and enter the form fields. Then follow the three steps and, upon completion, you will have created your Facebook page.

We now have our Facebook page setup. It’s time to set up the Facebook app that will act as a custom tab and allow us to bring our hosted WordPress blog into our page.

To set up a new app you’ll need to login to Facebook and navigate to the Facebook developer apps. You’ll then need to select the “Create new App” button that is situated in the top right hand corner of the page. You will then be asked to enter an ‘app display name’ and ‘app namespace’.