Deprecated Facebook Like Box / “Page Plugin”

Facebook is changing the way users can employ the “Like Box Widget”. I have no idea why – it’s yet another change to their code that makes us developers and website owners jump through extra hoops. The Like Box is deprecated and will stop working on June 23rd, 2015.

The bad news was that this new “Page Plugin” version was going to require a minimum width of 280 pixels but thankfully  Facebook changed it’s mind and will continue to allow narrower widths. Currently the allowed range is 180 to 500 pixels wide.

What is the Like Box?

Facebook provides a “Like Box” or “Page Plugin” that lets you easily embed and promote any Facebook Page on your website. The key advantage is that your visitors can like and share the Page without having to leave your site. The code you put on your page talks to Facebook and Facebook can tell if a user is logged into Facebook and then find connections between their friends and your page – and then show only the relevant faces. That’s a great way to add authority to your site.

So, this widget has:

• Link to the page
• Like button: Click Like to share and connect with things from other websites that you find interesting
• Share button: Click Share to write something about a link and then post it to your Timeline
• Faces (optional)
• “Page posts” (Embedded posts): Adds public posts from Facebook page (optional)
• Cover photo (optional)

WordPress plugin options

There are two plugins I like to use: The Facebook Like Box Plugin lets you easily embed and promote any Facebook Page on your WordPress website without having to grab the code from facebook.com. This plugin was updated and will automatically move over to using the new “Page Plugin” – but you will want to review the new options to make sure they match your site – especially the “cover” photo.

TIP: there is a little typo in this plugin – the “hide cover photo” option appears twice. The 2nd time that option appears it actual should say “hide faces”, so if you set it to ‘false’ then it will show faces.

The other plugin is part of Jetpack. They are aware of this issue and also make note that: Apparently If you do not manually upgrade the Page Plugin (which this PR does), the Like Box plugin implementation will automatically fall back to the Page Plugin on June 23rd 2015.

Here is the warning  about the update that will  make the old version stop working:

There a few improvements in this new version, such as:

• There are more options to customize the plugin
• The dimensions are more flexible
• The “Share” button is not cut when the width is lower than 280px
• The design is more modern

It’s quite easy to customize your plugin and you can see how it looks like right away, in the box down below.

The first and last images show how the widget looks like with the maximum and minimum width, respectively. Notice that the share button is removed when the width is lower than 280px, avoiding design issues.

Official page: Page Plugin