A team of some friends and I have come up with an app/product idea that we have been working on. I have to be vague on exactly what the details are, but hopefully I can explain it well enough to have the questions we have answered.
First, we have a web server with a database - we have developed all of the code for that in PHP. Each user will have a device which when an action is performed on the device, it sends a message to our server, and the PHP code on our server handles the message and stores the sent data in the appropriate fields in our database.
We want to run this through Facebook - we have an app and a Facebook page created for this. The idea is that when a user performs an action on his or her device and the message is sent to the server, the PHP code will automatically make a post on the Facebook page on the user’s behalf (not on the Page’s behalf).
Between all of us on working on this project, we have spent many days and many hours trying to figure out how to make the automatic post to the page. It’s extremely difficult googling this topic since all of the various examples are using different versions of the Facebook SDK (we are using the latest). There are lots of somewhat similar type questions/examples, but we can't find one that answers specifically what we are asking. In fact, we aren’t even sure that anybody but an ‘admin’ can post on a Facebook page with the new SDK, any longer. I do see this link in the Facebook developer section, https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/v2.5/page/feed, where it says under the Publishing section:
Permissions A user access token with publish_actions permission can be used to publish new posts on behalf of that person. Posts will appear in the voice of the user.
So, it sounds as if a user can post to the Facebook page if it is given an access token with publish_actions permission, yet we can’t find any example of code of this actually being done. Could anybody explain how to do the automatic posting to the page on a user’s behalf (hopefully, using PHP, since that is the language we are using on the server side), or at least point us to a good example? We are all experienced developers, but this is the first time any of us has done anything with Facebook development. So we certainly aren’t amateurs, but with Facebook development, we are. We may be overlooking something obvious, but after seeing so many links, my mind is jello.
A summary of our questions: 1. Can it even be done with the latest Facebook SDK that a post can be made to a Facebook Page for our product on the user’s behalf? (to be clear, we are talking about the Facebook Page we created for our app, not a user's page) 2. If so, what specific permissions do we need to give the user, just the publish_actions one? We don’t want to give the user too much permission to be able to screw up our page, of course. 3. Can this be done automatically with PHP from the server?
Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!
