What is the best way to create a designed Facebook feed on Craft CMS website?

Question

Hi I'm looking for recommendations as to how to create a designed Facebook feed on the home page of a Craft CMS website please?

I'm not a big fan of them but the client has requested it and it's a space filler but rather than use the standard / official feed provided by Facebook I am looking to create a very basic text snippet of the last two or three posts and I wanted to blend the design in with the website. I have a FB developer account and so I can create an App at that end but is this even possible?

I note there is a plugin called Placid as mentioned on another post but having looked at the Github page I'm unsure if this is the way forward or not.

I'm struggling to find a plugin on the Craft CMS store so if you have any recommendations it would be much appreciated. Just a very basic simple text feed with a link back to the Facebook post is all I'm after. Thanks.

Answer 1

If you don't want to directly embed a Facebook feed using the Page Plugin, you'll have to either use Facebook's API directly or find a third-party service to take care of this for you.

Facebook API

Take a look at the facebook developer docs to get started. There's an official PHP SDK (library), though it doesn't look like it's supported anymore. The Facebook Business SDK seems to be more up to date, though I'm not sure if it's applicable in your case. There are also a number of third-party libraries that consume Facebook's various APIs, though they tend to get abandoned rather quickly.

Of course, you can also just make API requests directly using a HTTP client like Guzzle, but that's a lot more work.

In my experience, connecting to social media APIs directly requires a lot of maintenance and upkeep. Facebook in particular tends to overhaul their API systems, authentication methods etc every couple of years and deprecate older APIs while they're at it. Right now you have to jump through a lot of hoops just to get an API key with useful permissions. That's a lot of work for just a simple social media feed. Therefore ...

Using a third-party service

It's a lot easier to find a third-party service that specializes in social media integrations and allows you to embed a feed combining different sources with ease. Most of those offer a large number of customization options to tweak the style to match your website. They also tend to have free and paid tiers, the free tier usually limits the available design options and the frequency with which the feeds are updated.

Here are some options for you to check out:

• Curator.io
• Juicer.io
• Walls.io