Platform Updates: New Open Graph Business Object Type

We introduced Operation Developer Love over two years ago to improve how we communicate with the developer community. Since then, we've made good progress fixing bugs, improving our documentation, and managing breaking changes. As our support processes have matured, these have become core focus areas for the team, and we've made our developer communication more targeted through developer alerts. Supporting our APIs and documentation remain a high priority for us, but going forward, we are changing our "Platform Updates" blog posts to focus on product announcements.

This week, we launched local currency payments, shared best practices for publishers, and announced support for using the Express web framework with Parse Hosting.

New Open Graph Business Object Type

Today we are introducing a new Open Graph (OG) business object type to allow us to better surface local business information in News Feed, Graph Search, Check-Ins, and Pages. Although this is not a breaking change, we recommend that developers start using this new OG business object type over custom OG objects to represent local business information.

If you have already established a custom business object, you can map your existing custom object to the OG business type. To do this, go to your custom object type settings and update your 'Inherits From:' section from 'Object' to 'Business'. You will notice that your properties will now include additional required fields for place and business contact information. You will also need to update your OG tags to include the new fields so that your custom object can inherit from the OG business type.

The new OG business object type has the following properties:

Required properties:

• og:url
• og:type
• og:title
• place:location:latitude
• place:location:longitude
• business:contact_data:street_address
• business:contact_data:locality
• business:contact_data:country
• business:contact_data:postal_code

Optional properties:

• business:contact_data:region
• business:contact_data:email
• business:contact_data:phone_number
• business:contact_data:fax_number
• business:contact_data:website
• business:hours:day
• business:hours:start
• business:hours:end

Please visit our business object reference and our documentation on creating object types for more information.