Article posted on AppBistro

In our attempt to keep you informed with the latest changes and updates to the Facebook Platform, we wanted to highlight a post from one of our partners. Today’s blogpost features Mike Gingerich from Tabsite. We are proud to offer their popular drag n’ drop page builder — perfect for building any custom layout on Facebook. The debate between FBML and iFrame will cease to exist this next year (as Facebook plans to discontinue support for their markup language altogether.) Below, Mike does a great job to explain how this will impact your current page if you’re using FBML and what you can do now to prepare.

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In late 2010, Facebook announced its plan to deprecate FBML as a Facebook page administration platform over time and move to iframes. This past March 2011, it followed up this statement with the announcement of a full transition to iFrames, phasing out FBML. Since March 2011, page admins have not been able to create any new FBML apps, but FBML apps which were already in existence remained functional until the deprecation was scheduled to begin.

Facebook has now announced at it’s most recent f8 Developer Conference that:

1. FBML will no longer be supported by Facebook beginning January 1, 2012. (This means no support and no bug fixes)

2. The final official end date when all FBML tabs will cease to work and will be removed from Facebook is set for June 1, 2012.

This June 1, 2012 date is when any remaining FBML apps inside of Facebook will cease to function. The time has come for those last holdouts to fully transition to an iFrame provider and depart from the FBML coding completely.

4 KEY TAKEAWAYS FOR BUSINESS OWNERS + PAGE ADMINS

1. What the heck is FBML and why should I care?

The answer is that, now, you don’t need to care, unless you already knew what FBML because you were using FBML on your Facebook Pages.  If you fall in the group that doesn’t need to know because you don’t have any FBML tabs on your fan page, then feel free to skip down to number two.

FBML is Facebook’s original framework for serving custom content on fan page tabs. This content is served by Facebook, which, in short, means the user’s browser never hits the app developer’s server directly.  Instead, Facebook requests the content from the app developer’s server, parses and filters it, and sends it to the browser for display.  The result is content served by Facebook on custom tabs.

The Static FBML app was an application provided by Facebook that enabled the creation of FBML based Facebook page tabs. To use the application, page admins simply added the app to their page, and then customize the content by coding using FBML code techniques.

Along with FBML, the Static FBML app will no longer be supported (w/ no further support from Facebook) starting January 1, 2012, and will NO LONGER WORK on pages beginning June 1, 2012.

2. What is Facebook’s preferred method for adding custom tabs to Fan Pages?

iFrame Apps are Facebook’s accepted framework for serving content on canvas pages as well as fan page tabs. Content is served directly by the application developer’s server, rather than being proxied by Facebook’s servers. Because the page is hosted externally of Facebook, it can render HTML, CSS and even Javascript just like any external web page does, which was not the same with FBML. iFrame Apps were launched in March of 2011 and are a big improvement. All TabSite fan page tabs use iFrame Apps.

3. I’m not a coder and yet I want a nice, custom fan page.  What should I do?

There are many available solutions from basic static html tab apps to more comprehensive page management tools, but we believe that the TabSite platform is a great solution for any small to medium sized business wanting to easily customize their fan page in minuets without having to outsource the design or manually manage the code.  With an easy to use drag-n-build system, our TabSite page builder is easy to navigate and has a full suite of customizable widgets + tools giving page admins the power to:

• Add Videos,
• Add/Edit Content using a WYSIWYG editor,
• Create Photo SlideShows
• Embed E-mail Sign-up forms
• Add your Blog and Twitter feeds
• Create a fan-gating mechanism with our Like-Gate tool

4. Don’t wait!

January 1, 2012 FBML is no longer Supported, and on June 1, 2012, FBML ceases to work.  Now is the time make sure your page management tool(s) are compliant with the upcoming changes, don’t be left in the dust. We highly encourage you to consider a solution like TabSite.