Coming up next week – June 23rd actually – Facebook is deprecating (meaning it’s going to stop working) their original Like Box which allowed you to include an awesome little blip on your website that let people like your Facebook fan page directly from your site (rather than having to go into Facebook, find your page, and like it from there). It looked something kind of like this…
The new version is called the Facebook Page Plugin.
It more or less does the same thing but it also does some kind of nice things for you. It still shows your posts and will show faces of your followers if you choose. But the biggest advantage to the new code is that the width of the box is now adaptive. So if your website is responsive (really, it should be by now), the new box will be scalable as well and look good and fit correctly on screens of all sizes. (This was possible with the old one, but it was a pain in the neck and required some fancy CSS to make it work.)
Facebook says that if you don’t manually change the code on your site by the 23rd, it will automatically start using the new version for you, but you still probably want to go ahead and get it changed beforehand. Leaving outdated code on your site is never a good idea as a general practice. Outdated code is one of the bigger security holes you can have on a website and hackers know to look for and exploit it.
If you want to get the updated code, it’s pretty easy.
Head over to the Facebook Page Plugin and fill in some blanks. Here’s a quick screencast to walk you through it if you need some help:
