New Facebook Page Change

An change was made today at Facebook, to be more specific it’s a new Facebook page change.  Most Facebook changes happen quietly without much publicity released from Facebook corporate, but this change was announced earlier this year and came along with an official notice on the Facebook Developer Blog.  The new Facebook page change is coming in the form of the ability to use iframes to create page tabs rather than the buggy FBML language that was used to create pages previously.

Today we announced major updates to Facebook Pages to help Page admins manage communications, express their brands, and increase engagement. As part of these changes, we are also updating the model for building apps on Pages.

Using iframes in Page Tabs

Many useful applications have been built for Facebook Pages like BandPage for artists to share their music with fans and Shop Now to help Pages sell merchandise on Facebook. As of today, you can build your Page Tab apps using iframes rather than FBML. This means you can now build apps that run across Facebook (including Pages and Canvas applications) using the same simple, standards-based web programming model (HTML, JavaScript, and CSS). In addition, you can easily integrate social plugins and the Graph API within your tab.

Valtchanov, Nikolay. “Introducing iframe Tabs for Pages.” Facebook Developers Blog. http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/462/ February 10, 2011. (accessed March 10, 2011).

New Facebook Page Change | For The Better

Unlike a lot of Facebook changes this change to page coding will likely not be met with resistance.  Many users have complained about the former FBML language that Facebook used because of it would not allow for things such as using javascript.  With the new Facebook page change to iframes we should see a lot more creativity and more functionality within the pages of Facebook.

For those that have an existing FBML page on Facebook, do not worry.  An announcement was also made to say that as of March 11, 2011 page administrators will no longer be able to add FBML pages or apps, however those that are currently using FBML will be able to continue doing so.

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