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Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love

May 2, 2012ByNoorin Ladhani

Since last Wednesday's update, we published a Developer Spotlight on Deezer, and best practices documentation for Android and iOS Facebook integration.

Best Practices: Creating Timeline Aggregations

This week we published a new product guide on Creating Timeline Aggregations. The purpose of this guide is to help product managers and developers understand how to create aggregations that people will find interesting.

Facebook IP ranges

To allow Facebook to scrape your pages, you can whitelist Facebook IP ranges. You can read more about it here.

Breaking Changes Effective Today

As announced on the Roadmap and Developer Blog, today the following changes are in effect:

offline_access Permission Removal
The offline_accesspermission is deprecated and will be removed on July 5, 2012. Today, we have turned the migration to "enabled" for all apps. If this breaks your app, you can turn the migration back to "disabled" until July 5, 2012 when it will be permanently "enabled" for all apps. Please see the Removal of offline_access Permission doc for more details.

Removal of group_type and group_subtype columns from group FQL table
We have removed the group_type and group_subtype columns of the group FQL table. Please ensure that your apps are not utilizing these columns.

Removing support to claim Domains using Page ID - Originally scheduled for April 1st
We have removed the ability to claim domains with a Page ID. The recommended option for claiming domains is with an App ID or User ID and existing domains that have been claimed will continue to work fine. After claiming domains, owners are able to view insights or run Domain Sponsored Stories. See the Insights documentation for more on the updated domain claiming flow.

August 2012 Breaking Changes Migration Now Available

We recently updated our Breaking Change Policy so that breaking changes only go out on the first Wednesday of each month to ensure all breaking changes are pushed during the work week. We are now making breaking changes easier for you to test via our Migrations framework. You can access migrations for your app by going to the Dev App, clicking on Settings, then the Advanced tab, and you'll see the Migrations section.

We have several existing individual migrations and we realize that it can be difficult to keep track of them. Going forwards we plan to group most breaking changes into monthly migrations (e.g. "July 2012 Breaking Changes"). We'll aim to make migrations available 90 days before the changes will go into effect. New migrations will default to the disabled state for all apps created before the day the migration is made available. Apps created after that date will automatically have the migration enabled.

August 2012 Breaking Changes (90-day notice)

The following changes will be in effect on August 1, 2012:

Deleting FB.Canvas.setAutoResize - Originally scheduled for January 1, 2011
We have renamed FB.Canvas.setAutoResize to FB.Canvas.setAutoGrow so that the method more accurately represents its function. FB.Canvas.setAutoResize will stop working on July 5th. We will completely delete the function on August 1st (if you call it you will get an "undefined function" error).

Page Post GETs from Graph API/FQL Will Require an Access Token
All calls to GETPageposts from the Graph API or FQL will now require an access token to be used.

The following changes can all be enabled/disabled using August 2012 Breaking Changes settings until August 1st when they will go into effect permanently for everyone:

Removing prompt_permissions.php and prompt_feed.php
We will be removing a very old version of the feed dialog (/connect/prompt_feed.php) as well as a very old version of the auth dialog (/connect/prompt_permissions(s).php). If you are one of the very few developers still using these legacy endpoints, you should upgrade to the current Feed Dialog and/or OAuth Dialog.

Removing Add To Timeline Plugin
We will be removing the Add to Timeline plugin. If you are embedding the Add to Timeline plugin, we will render the Login Button in its place with the publish_actionspermission automatically added to the scope parameter.

Please check out the Developer Roadmap for more upcoming changes.

Bugs activity between Tuesday, April 24 and Tuesday, May 1

  • 125 bugs were reported
  • 33 bugs were reproducible and accepted (after duplicates removed)
  • 11 bugs were by design
  • 26 bugs were fixed
  • 65 bugs were duplicate, invalid, or need more information

Bugs fixed between Tuesday, April 24 and Tuesday, May 1

Activity on facebook.stackoverflow.com between Tuesday, April 24 and Tuesday, May 1

  • 454 questions asked
  • 403 questions with a score of 0 or greater
  • 139 answered, 34% answered rate
  • 236 replied, 59% reply rate