Documentation

If you are new to Facebook Tab Manager, start by reading Creating a Basic Page Tab with Facebook Tab Manager for WordPress. Facebook Tab Manager provides many options and variations, but do not let all the options overwhelm you. If you simply want to create and update content for your Facebook page through WordPress, this article will tell you what you need to know. One of the designers who uses it created a nice video on installing the plugin, if you need help with that.

For an explanation of an important prerequisite for this plugin, see Why You MUST Provide a Secure URL for Facebook Tab Manager. As an alternative, Facebook Tab Manager hosting with built-in SSL support is also available through TabMgr.com.

You can also view the replay of a webinar I conducted on September 15, which goes over the essential features and includes some Q&A with the audience.

Basic Options

You can customize the display of your post using a series of checkbox options on the editing screen.

These same checkbox options appear on the plugin’s Settings screen, allowing you to set defaults for things like whether links should open in a new window.

You can also customize the display of posts by including custom Cascading Style Sheets code in the “CSS Styles” box in the Options section. A second text entry field lets you specify additional html to be included in the document <head> such as references to external style sheets or scripts.

As with the checkbox options, you can set default values for these fields on the Settings screen.

Advanced Options

Here are some of the ways you can use Facebook Tab Manager:

Terminology: A WordPress Shortcode is a placeholder for content that will be processed dynamically when the page is displayed. When shortcodes are wrapped around content, the content is passed to the shortcode function as a parameter. Facebook Tab Manager uses this for condiditional display of some content with the fblike and fbtab shortcodes.
  • Present one post to newcomers who visit your page and a different post to people who have already clicked the Like button, which means they are now “fans” or subscribers to your content. This is sometimes called a “reveal tab” or “gate tab.” John Hayden has a great video that covers the options to do this with Facebook Tab Manager.
  • Use the Reveal Tab Setup utility to pick alternate posts to be displayed to these audiences. The typical use for this effect is to display a graphic or other message to newcomers urging them to click the Like button and a different message to page fans, perhaps including exclusive fan-only content. If you don’t like working with code when writing or editing posts, this may be a better option than the shortcodes described below.
  • Designate blocks of content within a page that should only be displayed to fans, or only displayed to non-fans. This is similar to the “reveal tab” effect, except that your post can also include content that is displayed to all viewers regardless of their “fan” status. You do this using the fblike shortcode with like=”1″ or like=”0″ as attributes on the shortcode. The format is [fblike like="0"]CONTENT TO SHOW TO NEW VISITORS[/fblike] [fblike like="1"]FAN-ONLY CONTENT[/fblike]. You can include multiple paragraphs of content, wrapped inside an fblike tag — just be sure to include the [/fblike] code at the end. See the Facebook Tab Manager shortcode documentation for more details.
  • Include a list of headlines or post excerpts by including the fbtab shortcode with a query string as one of the parameters. For example, [fbtab query="category_name=facebook-tab-manager" format="excerpt"] would load a list of headlines and post excerpts from the specified category. The fbtab shortcode also supports the like=”1″ and like=”0″ parameters for fan and non-fan content. See the shortcode documentation.
  • Include inline JavaScript with your post. This is another function of the fbtab shortcode. See the shortcode documentation.
  • Create a custom theme with your own CSS and page templates.
  • Add a loading… animation effect (preloader) if pages are slow to load because of large images or server-side processing.
  • Display an existing post or page as a Facebook tab by adding ?fb=tab to the end of the web address. Other query string options allow you to add basic filter and resizing parameters. See the documentation for re-purposing WordPress content for display on Facebook.

See also the Facebook Tab Manager category on the Carr Communications blog. Watch this site for the most current updates.

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