Questions about connecting Facebook Connect
I hope this is resolved, but I have a number of questions regarding Facebook Connect, I'm not at all sure how I should implement this.
I am working on a live music type service and currently have user registration, etc. If I were to implement Facebook Connect along with this, could I still send Facebook Connect users as if they were in my database?
Also, it would instead be possible for users who have to "link" their Facebook accounts to be registered, so I can provide them with the benefits of Facebook sharing and friend invites, while at the same time I have a real registered user on my system.
I tried to read the answers to the above questions, but what I have found is rather ambiguous.
Thank you, we look forward to your views.
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Facebook's documenting process is very low, so don't feel bad about having a hard time getting started. Their wiki-style approach to documentation, without any real official docs, tends to leave the "process flow" difficult to understand and requires you to combine parts of a piece of randomly scattered docs.
Facebook is committed to protecting privacy, so they never make the user's actual email address available to app developers via Connect or regular apps. They do have a proxy email system that you can use, however you must get explicit permission from the user in order to email them. There's a decent document for the proxy address here. You can get permission by requesting it; there are several methods for doing this linked in this document.
As far as linking Facebook and local accounts goes, this will definitely be the way to go. When a Connect user connects to the network, you want to store that fact for that user so you can provide Facebook functionality. I would just create a regular user account in the database for each new Connect user that came with its own local ID, so you don't have to do special handling on the two different types of user accounts throughout the site. That being said, the account should obviously be marked as a Facebook user account (I am using the columnexternalId
in my user table), and any part of the site that is referenced by information that you might have locally would need to handle the Facebook aspect correctly (for example, using a proxy mail instead of regular email).
For existing users, you can organize an "account link" by following the process by which they will log into FB Connect after they have already logged into the site, and you can detect this and just add your FB ID to your users table. they can log in via Connect in the future or through your normal process. I've never done this, but it should be possible.
If you write your account handling code well enough, your site should be able to function normally no matter what kind of user you throw it in.
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