WordPress Facebook integration plugin was released on wordpress.org as a free download just 10 days ago. Developed as a joint effort between Facebook (Matt Kelly)  and the WordPress development team and a number of other developers – it is the first ever officially sanctioned (by WordPress and Facebook) WordPress Facebook integration Plugin.

I like other thousands of other WordPress developers and millions of WordPress users expected it to be great. But its not – that is not to say it won’t be, but in its initial release stage it is almost unusable.

The features promised looked awesome.

• When publishing a new page or post the plugin enables you to mention Facebook friends or pages, and add a message that is posted with the content to those friends and pages’ Timelines.
• Mentions on Facebook about the post or page show up in the post or page.
• The post shows up on of the Authors Timeline as an Open Graph action, the Timeline of any friend or page mentioned as part of the post and any Facebook page the author chooses that automatically publishes the WordPress site’s content once it is live.
• Offers a variety of social plugins that they can easily enable on posts and pages including Like, Send and Subscribe buttons.
• Facebook comments that can be indexed by search engines.
• Recommendations Bar that lets users start getting recommendations, “Like” content and add what they’re currently reading to Timeline.

Since release the WordPress Facebook integration plugin has been downloaded 43,000+ times .. BUT what is really surprising is and how many bugs this plugin has.

On installing v1.0 of the WordPress Facebook integration plugin we immediately found that it caused a conflict with our WP User Reviews and WP e-Commerce Product Reviews plugins which both have Facebook lib.

Fatal error: Cannot re-declare class Facebook in /home/xxxxxx/public_html/wp-content/plugins/post_reviews/facebook_libs/facebook.php on line 93

We updated both plugins by changing the class name. The next issue we found was that the WordPress Facebook integration plugin developers have hooked the Facebook comments into the post content? Have no idea why you’d do that. Also had issues with the comment counts not showing and past comments not showing.

The final straw was when I went to update a post and got this fatal error. It was at that point I decided to deactivate it and wait for the update. We installed the WordPress Facebook integration plugin on 2 clients sites and were able to get it to work in a fashion after lots of debugging.

Last night – v 1.0.1 was released with an extensive list of fixes.

Installing it just now I notice that it has a conflict with the Sharedaddy and Jetpack plugins which is really surprising as both the extensions are build by Automatic the co-authors of the WordPress Facebook plugin. I’ll publish this post now and see what other bugs appear.

As soon as we can see that the WordPress Facebook Integration plugin is stable and reliable we intend to roll out out across our clients sites – Sue Manton at Little Haven Palliative Care has asked that we add their site to the top of our implementation list.

Update:

It worked! – In a fashion – not pretty though I think we’ll wait for the next update and test it again before rolling it to our clients sites.