Review of Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect WordPress Plugins

Since Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect were announced I have been curious to see how easy it would be to integrate either or both services into WordPress. I haven’t had that much time to build a community around my various personal websites, such as this one, until recently, so I’ve put it off since the beginning of the year. However, I do have a reasonable number of Facebook friends as well as a growing Twitter following (Google Friend Connect has Twitter integration), so I’m hoping to port those communities into my personal sites such as this one – which of course is exactly what Facebook and Google want me to do.

So I’ve spent a few hours trying to integrate both Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect into this WordPress blog using three different plugins – I always try to get what I need done with plugins before trying other routes. I’d like to review these three plugins, two of which are for Facebook Connect and one of which is for Google Friend Connect. I’ll start with Facebook Connect.

Official Facebook Connect WordPress Plugin

Developed from inside of Facebook, this is the least useful of the three plugins I tried out. Basically, the only benefits that you get from this plugin (if you can get it to work) are Facebook signin to leave comments. It really doesn’t seem to offer anything else, and with not widgets included, it is difficult to install (you have to manually copy and paste code into you Comments.php file for one – and the installation instructions don’t say exactly where). Also, this plugin also crashed my dashboard once, so I had to delete the plugin directory completely for my dashboard to start working again. Also, as with the next plugin, you have to go through a somewhat time consuming process of setting up a Facebook Application to get an application siteID, etc, all of which the average WordPress user I’m sure would just as well avoid. Overall it was not a pleasant experience.

That said, if WordPress and Facebook’s talented teams can work together, I’m sure they could create a great WP plugin, which much more integration and funtionality. Hopefully that will happen, as a truly integrated plugin with full auth, image sharing, and other features would really help Facebook push their network and content out.

Facebook Connector Plugin

This plugin was developed by a company called sixjump. From the fair amount of comments on their site, it seems to work about half of the time for people. The developers give a few installation suggestions to try to get that ratio higher, but I tried them all and still could not get it to work properly on any of the the 3 WordPress powered blogs I attempted to add it to. The biggest problem (and this was a bug in the official Facebook plugin as well) was getting the Facebook Connect button to show up. Apparently the Facebook Connnect button requires FBML to work – if Facebook really wants to make Facebook Connect workable across the web, then they are going to have to change this to javascript or similar, because while Facebook Platform developers had to learn to deal with FBML, I really doubt your average blog user will take the time to do so.

All that aside, for the sites that this plugin does work on, it looks good and is functional, and I really wish I could have gotten it to work.  Another plus is that it comes with ready to use WordPress widgets, which is another thing I look for in quality user-facing plugins. That ut again, I couldn’t, and I’m realitively proficient at adapting plugins into my sites. Ok, now onto the Google Friend Connect plugin.

Google Friend Connect Plugin

To start off, as you can see at the far right of my blog, Iam using Google Friend Connect. I had started out this process planning on offering both Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect on this blog. However, neither Facebook Connect plugin worked, so by the time I tried the Google Friend Connect plugin (I only found one), I wasn’t too hopeful. While not perfectly easy, I was, however, able to get Google Friend Connect to work on my WordPress blog.

It took me two tries to get the plugin correctly configured, partly I think due to the setup of my site. Overall it worked ok, but what I really want is just a simple way to integrate all of my Twitter friends into this gadget, however, that really doesn’t seem to be possible right now.