Web & game design services from Leeds, Yorkshire
Web & game design services from Leeds, Yorkshire
Published Tuesday 17th March 2015
This is an old post and Facebook have since closed access to their XML feeds. It's still possible to access Facebook content via their APIs which we'll write a blog post on later. In the meantime, please contact us if you're trying to do this and need some help. We've kept this post because it might still be useful to somebody.
It's surprisingly easy to output a Facebook post onto your website using PHP. Use this short snippet of code to display your own Facebook page posts.
<p>"<?php
// First we need the Facebook ID of our page. You can get this from the About -> Page Info screen of any Facebook page.
$pageID = '479406922120097';
// Hidden behind every Facebook page is a simple RSS feed, but to get to it we have to pretend to be a web browser. We do this by faking a common user agent string. This one is Chrome on a 64bit Linux system.
ini_set('user_agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) ');
// Next, load the RSS feed into SimpleXML.
$facebook_xml = simplexml_load_file('http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?format=rss20&id='.$pageID);
// For this example we're just going to output the first post, and before we output it we're going to strip out everything that proceeds a double br, because that tends to be the site preview stuff that Facebook likes to autogenerate when posting a link.
$facebook_xml_cleaned = explode('<br/><br/>', $facebook_xml->channel->item[0]->description);
$facebook_xml_cleaned = $facebook_xml_cleaned[0];
echo $facebook_xml_cleaned;
?>"</p>The RSS feed contains other useful data so be sure to look over it's full content and adjust this script for your own needs.
Ric is a senior web and game programmer with nearly 30 years industry experience and countless programming languages in his skillset. He's worked for and with a number of design and development agencies, and is the proprietor of QWeb Ltd. Ric is also a Linux server technician and an advocate of free, open-source technologies. He can be found on Mastodon where he often posts about the projects he's working on both for and outside of QWeb Ltd, or you can follow and support his indie game project on Kofi. Ric also maintains our Github page of useful scripts.
Blog posts are written by individuals and do not necessarily depict the opinions or beliefs of QWeb Ltd or its current employees. Any information provided here might be biased or subjective, and might become out of date.
Ric, Friday 26th June 2015 11:30
As of June 23rd, Facebook’s RSS feeds have been taken offline and officially deprecated, so this method no longer works.
We’ll write an article on using the Graph API to return the same data soon.
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