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Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love

October 31, 2012ByZhen Fang

Search in App Center

We're beginning to rollout keyword search in the App Center. All listed app detail pages will be included in our search index, and no changes are necessary for developers.

App Dashboard Updates

This week, we're announcing several updates to the App Dashboard:

Support for transparent icons

Based on requests from developers, we now support alpha transparency for icons uploaded in PNG format. To take advantage of this feature, please upload new icons in the App Details area of the App Dashboard.

Sponsored Results now available

You can now promote your app in Facebook search through the App Dashboard. Canvas app developers will now see a Promote tab and can create an ad by going to the Search Results section and following the 4 steps to create a Sponsored Result. For greater targeting functionality, you can continue to create Sponsored Results through Power Editor and the API.

Smoother process for entering company information

We've updated the App Dashboard to make it a lot easier to enter your company information, which is used to pay out your app's earnings. In five simple steps, new apps can enter all data required to set up their financial entity. The data you submit and how we communicate with your IT systems remains the same, so existing apps don't have to make any changes. This update will roll out over the next few weeks. Check out the revised documentation for more details.

Breaking changes in effect on November 7th, 2012

Several breaking changes will be going into effect next week on Wednesday, November 7th. Please review this list of changes to ensure your app is up to date and will continue working after we make these changes next week.

The following change will go into effect on November 7th, 2012:

No more payments reporting emails
We will stop sending payments reporting emails. You can download daily reports of transaction data using our Payments Reporting API.

The following changes can all be enabled/disabled using the "November 2012 Breaking Changes" migration until November 7th when they will go into effect permanently for everyone:

Notifications table no longer returns pid/aid for photos/albums
The object_id field on the notification FQL table will return photo ids and album ids (called object_id and album_object_id respectively in the photo FQL table) instead of pid and aid.

New permission required to read Page mailboxes
In order to read a Page's mailbox (PAGE_ID/conversations in the Graph API or unified_* FQL tables), you will need the read_page_mailboxes permission. The read_mailbox permission will now only give you access to a user's mailbox.

The following change can be enabled/disabled using the "External Page Migration" migration until November 7th when it will go into effect permanently for everyone:

External Page migration
You will no longer be able to publish content to the News Feeds of users who have liked your Open Graph object. This feature will only be available for Facebook Pages. Please see the Like Button Migration doc for more details.

Check out the Developer Roadmap for all updates on breaking changes.

Bugs activity between Wednesday, October 24 and Wednesday, October 31

  • 245 bugs were reported
  • 21 bugs were reproducible and accepted (after duplicates removed)
  • 4 bugs were by design
  • 22 bugs were fixed
  • 68 bugs were duplicate, invalid, or need more information

Bugs fixed between Wednesday, October 24 and Wednesday, October 31

Activity on facebook.stackoverflow.com

  • 348 questions asked
  • 80 questions with a score of 0 or greater
  • 30 answered, 23% answered rate
  • 57 replied, 71% reply rate