Manish Choudhury

This post shows you how to add Facebook comment boxes, on your WordPress blog, similar to the ones you see on this site.

1. In your WordPress Dashboard, go to the Plugins section and click on Add New
2. Click on the “Facebook” tag under “Popular Tags”
3. Find the one called “WordPress Connect”. It’s a collection of widgets.
   
   Click on the “Install” link to install the plugin. On the screen which pops up – click on “Install Plugin”.
4. After WordPress installs the plugin, click on “Activate Plugin”
5. If everything goes well, WordPress will create a menu on the left menu bar, for the Connect plugin
   
   
6. The plugin that you just installed, needs a Facebook API key, in order to work. Before you can start using the widgets and modules, you will need to create a Facebook application, in order to get the API key. In case you don’t already have a Facebook Application, go to http://www.facebook.com/developers to start building it.
7. If you are visiting the Facebook developers site for the first time, Facebook will ask you to add the Facebook Developers application, to your Facebook profile. Click on the accept button, to add the application to your Facebook profile.
8. Once you have added the Facebook application, on the top of the screen you will see the Set Up New Application button. Click on the button to start building your first Facebook application.
   
9. Enter an application name for your application. You can name it anything you want.
   
10. On the next screen you will find the Facebook API key you need.
    
    But there are a few more steps before you can start using the plugin.
11. Go to the Connect tab and change the Connect URL to your site’s name.
    
    You need to make sure that you are entering the right URL. There is a difference between http://manishc.com and http://www.manishc.com – websites are often configured so that both these URLs display the same webpage, it makes a big difference to applications like Facebook. To overcome this problem enter the base domain. If your website is http://www.yourwebsite.com – your base domain will be yourwebsite.com
12. You will also need to make sure that your connect URL ends in a trailing slash like http://manishc.com/ or Facebook will give you an error.
13. Click on the Save Changes button on the bottom of the screen and your Facebook application is ready.
14. Return to the WordPress dashboard and open the settings for the  Connect plugin, by clicking on the Connect plugin menu, on the left menu bar of your WordPress dashboard
    
15. Enter the Facebook API key into the field called APP ID
    
    You can fill out the other settings too, but in this case we’ll just leave them blank.
16. Your plugin is ready. You can go to the Widgets section, under the Appearance menu of your WordPress dashboard, and  add the widgets to your WordPress theme.
17. You can also add the Facebook Like button and the Facebook Comments box, to your blog posts like you see on this website. In order to do that, go to the comments section, under the Connect plugin settings
    
18. Activate the check box which says “Add the Comments Module to your posts”. You can also configure how many comments should be displayed and the width of the comments box.
    
    The Comments box includes the Like button – so if you activate the Comments box, you don’t need to activate the Like button separately.
19. If you want just the Facebook Like button, you can go to the Like button settings in the Connect plugin menu
    
20. The Facebook Like button has several settings you can configure, like enabling the display of user’s profile pictures under the Like button
    
21. If you are logged in to Facebook, the Comments module will also display an Administrate Comments link at the bottom of the module, which will let you add Administrators and Morderators for the comments. It will also let you configure the module to allow anonymous comments.
    

Your Facebook comments box is ready. Whatever users comment on will be synced to their Facebook profiles.