Programatically log in to facebook and post from server side

Question

I want to connect my web application with the facebook business page. Each time I add a new product to the page I want to post it on facebook wall. I have a facebook application and the page owner username and password. Can I automatically authenticate with the user, pass to facebook and send the post request from server side only? Usually I am logged in with another facebook account when I add products. Also I would like to post when another page user add a product.

Answer 1

You can post to Facebook as a facebook page using the manage_pages permission. You'd need to obtain this permission from a user who is an administrator of the page. There are a few steps to the process, here is a basic summary:

• Get an access token from a user who is an administrator of the page and has granted "manage_pages" to your app. read about authentication here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/

• using that access token, make a graph request to

  https://graph.facebook.com/me/accounts?access_token=USER_AUTH_TOKEN

• You'll get a json response containing all the pages the user administrates, containing their name, category, facebook id, and an auth token - this is what you'll need to post to that page

• you can then use this access token to post to the specific page using

  https://graph.facebook.com/PAGE_ID/feed?message=POST_MESSAGE&access_token=AUTH_TOKEN&method=post

I just found this blog post which gives you a pretty good explanation http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/465/

Answer 2

It sounds like you need the 'offline_access' extended permission.

It is scheduled to be deprecated. Take a look at the following link for more details:

Deprecation of Offline Access Permission

I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on this, but I do NOT recommend trying to login through Facebook's user interface and perform POST requests/HTML scraping on behalf of the user. That procedure would grant you far more functionality than is possible through the Graph API; I don't think Facebook would approve of this.