Dolphin Tutorial

How to enable the usage of Facebook accounts in my Dolphin website?

The fact that there is Facebook out there might not make you sorry that you have started to build your social network on your own, but the opposite – Facebook grew a lot, so will your website, as long as you market it properly.

This is why, you should take advantage of every possible way of targeting new members, including taking advantage of most social networks, such as Facebook, which provides you with the ability to ease your members to use their Facebook registration on your website, as well. All you need to get started, is to register at the Facebook Developers website, direct link to which is available here for your convenience –  http://developers.facebook.com/setup and obtain API and secret key.

You need this, in order for your Dolphin application to authenticate against the Facebook tools, one of which is the login form:

In the “Site name” box type a brief description of your website, such as “My Community for something” or similar and in the “Site URL” box type the address to your Dolphin installation, including http:// like http://mydolphinsite.com/somefolder/ . When you click the “Create an application button” you will be ready to go and forwarded to a similar screen:

Copy and paste the APP ID and the APP secret somewhere, as you will need them a bit later, in order to activate the login functionality of Dolphin using Facebook registrations.  Then click on the Developer dashboard link and you will be present with your Facebook API basic information:

Advance further to the Canvas menu (at the Facebook Developer page):

There, you should change the “Render method”, which is IFrame by default to FBML:

Once you click the “Save changes” button on the bottom of the page, you can safely advance to the Connect menu, which is again in the Facebook Developer page:

There, you should fill out the “Connect URL”, which is your website’s address, including the http:// like in our demo, http://dolphin.tmdhosting920.com. You should also fill the “Base Domain”, inputting your domain name there. In our case this is dolphin.tmdhosting920.com (without the http:// prefix). If your Dolphin is in a subfolder, you actually need to enter only the domain. For example, if it is in http://dolphin.tmdhosting920.com/community we still will fill dolphin.tmdhosting920.com in the Base Domain, but http://dolphin.tmdhosting920.com/community in the “Connect URL”:

When you save the changes in the Facebook developer page, in order to continue the process, you need to install the Facebook Connect module for Dolphin, which is available by default and requires a few clicks to be activated. Navigate to the Tools > Modules menu:

This is the place, as you will later learn, which is the Dolphin Extensibility center. Via it you can install and uninstall various modules, which will extend your social network’s functionality and usability. In the list at the right side, locate Facebook Connect, mark the checkbox in front of it and click “Install”.

Upon completion, you will be present with a message that confirms the installation:

You are almost there. Now, a new icon should have appeared in the Modules main menu:

Click on it and fill the data in the form that you will be present with. Both can be obtained from the Developer dashboard, as mentioned above.

Now, when your members try to login to your website, they will be present with a drop down menu, from which they can choose either to login with the username they registered on your site (Basic) or using Facebook Connect (via Facebook)

Choosing the Facebook connect will forward your visitors to a Facebook page, where they will be asked to authenticate with their Facebook account.

Once authenticated, your members will be asked (once only) to add the application to their account and allow access to it:

That’s it, pretty much, if you have followed the above step by step, your visitors should be able to authenticate in your website using their Facebook accounts.