The web presence of SpareChangeNews.Net remains, unfortunately, small at best. As a primarily print publication, we've had a hard time getting our writers and editors on board with the website, let alone our readers.
One of the most recurrent complaints I get is that people can't remember their login. I don't blame them! And then I played around with Facebook Connect on my personal site, and it was a breeze to deploy, and met all my personal requirements: leaving an account on Drupal, allowing linking, easy access, the comments, etc. stay on our site (unlike Disqus which I dislike for that very reason).
So, has anyone seen any problems with Facebook Connect module? Any concerns I should be aware of, or any broader bases of support I should look into?
Thanks,
Michael
Comments
have you thought about other approaches?
That's awesome that you implemented FB Connect and are having success with it. For the news site, have you thought of a less proprietary solution that just solves your business problem? Not that OpenID and FB Connect are apples & oranges, but I think it's worth weighing both if you haven't already.
A little reading not meant to sway you either way:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_connect_vs_open_id.php
http://benward.me/blog/oauth-flow
It'll take a lot of thought and probably some custom dev to make openid/oauth as easy for your users, but my personal take is that this might be better than the hooks into (and from) FB. (Call me paranoid.)
I'd love to hear what others have done when faced with this problem. Toward that end, it might be good to get feedback from these groups, as well:
http://groups.drupal.org/openid
http://groups.drupal.org/facebook-api
Thanks!
Thanks a lot for the feedback!
I'm a big fan of OpenID, and not particularly a fan of closed platforms like Facebook, but these were some of the issues I was considering:
I guess my hope is to move to OpenAuth "eventually," particularly if we can achieve some of the usability that second articles discusses. In the meantime, I'll definitely take a deeper look at OpenAuth on Drupal. Maybe it'll even fit in today.
Web guy, SpareChangeNews.net
Twitter: @morisy / @sparechangenews
Best of both worlds
Looks like I might soon be able to get the best of both worlds soon, anyways:
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/11/hybrid-onboarding.html
Web guy, SpareChangeNews.net
Twitter: @morisy / @sparechangenews
Issues with FBconnect
The main advantage of Fbconnect is that it has fast registration mode witch bypass drupal’s standard registrations form. By this way, Drupal creates automatically an account upon de data of FaceBook. Seems nice but there are some issues:
Email field. The email address field created by the fats registration mode (proxied email) in the users table is useless because it’s being truncated to 64 chars and the FaceBook’s proxied email has an 82 chars length. So forget sending to your FB users a newsletter. (http://drupal.org/node/590314)
Logout. When a user logout from the Drupal site, it’s being logged out from FaceBook a same time. Nice for the user…
See other issues a the Fbconnect module: http://drupal.org/project/issues/fbconnect?categories=All
Here in Bolivia, I’ve used OpenId and failed because in 6 months, nobody used this login way.
Hope this Help.
KarimB - Read the blog Le blog en français