Developer news
Announcing Plugins for Facebook Connect

We opened Facebook Connect less than two weeks ago and have been excited to see over 80 sites go live. In addition to a variety of sites and several leading publications, you'll see that many major blogs have implemented Facebook Connect, such as TechCrunch, Inside Facebook, and Gawker.com.

Today we're announcing the Facebook Connect Plugin Directory to help all developers and bloggers find plugins to easily integrate Facebook Connect into their sites and blogs. We invite you, our development community, to create, list, and offer or sell your own plugins through this directory.

As we announced on stage at our f8 conference in July, Six Apart has built and released an Open Source plugin which allows any Facebook user to sign in, comment, and share their actions using Facebook Connect on any Movable Type powered site. This plugin runs on Movable Type 4.2 and is integrated into the upcoming release of Motion, a new free social application designed to power interactive communities that connect with the rest of the Web.

In addition to Six Apart, we're excited to see many other developers in the community start projects to bring Facebook Connect to blogs and other publishing systems, including WordPress, MediaWiki, Drupal, and more. In the plugin directory today, you can find integrations for:

  • Movable Type - Six Apart has built an Open Source plugin which adds Facebook Connect to any Movable Type powered site and allows any Facebook user to sign in, comment and share their actions on Facebook
  • WordPress - Sociable has built an Open Source WordPress plugin to add Facebook Connect to your WordPress blog and offer community features including showing recent visitors, inviting friends and sharing comments with friends on Facebook
  • WordPress - Adam Hupp built an Open Source WordPress plugin to easily integrate Facebook Connect into your blog for login and commenting. This is now available for open-source and we look forward to your improvements
  • Disqus - Disqus integrated Facebook Connect into their commenting features
  • MediaWiki - Garrett Brown started an experimental MediaWiki extension to incorporate Facebook Connect login and identity into your MediaWiki site

It's still early but we're hearing that some blogs have seen an almost 2x increase in comments, and many have also sensed an increase in the quality of dialogue, as more commenters are using their real names and pictures.

We're excited about the community of developers using Facebook Connect already, and look forward to all of the new tools to help make integrating Facebook Connect into your site even easier. For plugin developers, we've offered some new documentation. As always, stay tuned for more.