Blogging

Facebook is obviously one of the most popular social networking sites on the World Wide Web nowadays. Every netizen is likely to have a Facebook account. If you are into blogging, it is now possible for you to merge a Facebook account into your blog. This guide will teach you the steps on how you can make your blogging more productive and meaningful by integrating Facebook.

CMS or XHTML Websites

For most people,  Wordpress has been the most common platform for creating their blogs. However, other people also use custom CMS or XHTML websites such as Ruby or Django. Recently, Facebook Connect Wizard and Facebook Connect Playground was launched making it much easier to integrate the application into your blog. The beauty of this feature is that you can add sample codes and widgets for making comments, Facebook Connect buttons, to name just a few.

Wordpress

One of the most popular blogging platforms is Wordpress. With its vibrant features, it would be easy to think that Facebook integration will be easy as A-B-C. Although, there are plug-ins available, it would be still difficult to set everything up. Fortunately, there are excellent resources and tools in place for integrating your Wordpress blog into Facebook.

• WP-FBConnect. Introduced by Facebook engineer Adam Hupp, this plugin has not been upgraded much compared with the other options but it does provide a way to integrate Facebook Connect with WordPress. Here, users simply use their Facebook login to leave comments and have their avatar appear on your website. For more information on how to connect this plugin, you can check out this link: http://www.adambreckler.com/setting-up-facebook-connect-for-wordpress
• Sociable Facebook Connect. Another tool you can consider integrating into your blog is the Facebook Connect plugin of Sociable.es. This is frequently updated and provides other features such as adding a box displaying recent visitors, commenters, and friends. The drawback of this option is that it will always create a new user on your blog which is not always the ideal scenario.
• WPBook. This plugin is unlike any other because it allows you to cross-post all the contents of your blog into Facebook. Another feature of this plug-in is that it has the ability to make comments on one entry visible on the other. This is ideal if you do not want to share your content to other people but want to avoid tracking down separate conversations.
• Add A Blog Feed. If you are not after the comments but simply want the content of your blogs to be visible on Facebook, Six Apart provides a helpful guide on how to add your external blog feed. Although this is intended for users of TypePad, it is an excellent tool if you have a blog that has RSS feed.

TypePad/Movable Type

Six Apart has a couple of blogging platforms that can be considered for integrating Facebook into your blog namely MovableType and TypePad. In December 2008, the company introduced Facebook Connect Commenters plugin for the former while for the former, they added Facebook compatibility in its latest release, the TypePad Motion, which allows posting your blog from Facebook, show the updates and allow user comments with the user’s Facebook or Twitter account.

Drupal and Joomla for Facebook

Drupal and Joomla are among the top open source content management system platforms that provides robust features ideal for larger sites and communities. They offer powerful tools that allows you to integrate Facebook into your blog.

Comment Systems

If your principal aim is to have the users leave their comments, you can check out third-party commenting systems that can be integrated into various sites and platforms.

Given all these tools and resources, it is now possible for you to integrate the highly-popular Facebook into your blogging website.