Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love

Operation Developer Love

This week, we introduced iframe Tabs for Pages, made progress improving browser performance for HTML5 Games by releasing JSGameBench version 0.2, and updated our Platform policies.

Custom date format in Graph API

To simplify and make things more convenient for developers, applications can now specify a custom date format in the Graph API, using &date_format=[format], where format is a string, similar to the PHP date function.

The example below modifies the date format of a specific Event:

<?php 
   
  $date_format = "F%20j%20Y,%20g:i%20a";
  $graph_url = "http://graph.facebook.com/331218348435&date_format=" 
    . $date_format;

  $event = json_decode(file_get_contents($graph_url));

  echo '<pre>';
  print_r($event);
  echo '</pre>';

?>

The example prints start_time and end_time in the specified string format instead of ISO-8601 formatted date/time or a UNIX timestamp:

 [start_time] => March 14 2010, 9:00 pm
 [end_time] => March 15 2010, 12:30 am

Age range support for iframe applications

As previously announced, we’re in the process of deprecating FBML based applications. As part of that effort, we are adding support to the signed_request passed to iframe applications to replace what is provided via the FBML tags fb:18-plus, fb:21-plus, and fb:restricted-to so that apps can continue to do appropriate age gating of content. We have updated the signed_request to include an age range object (containing min and max number of the age) in the user field. You can use this feature to customize your app to the user’s age demographic (e.g., allowing U.S. users over 18 to register to vote). Please note that this does not provide access to specific age of the user.

Give users choice and control (re: photo tagging)

Across Facebook profiles and now Pages, a collection of recently tagged photos appears at the top. This feature is intended for users and Page admins to display recently tagged photos of themselves or of their brand to indicate recent activity. Since launch we have received numerous questions about apps letting users change the row of recently tagged photos.

A few apps are enabling a user to manipulate friends' photo strips into a banner by tagging those friends in a set of images. Tagging multiple people in photos that do not depict them is often seen as spam by users. Spamming users is prohibited by our Facebook Platform Principles and subject to enforcement. For more information, please see our Examples and Explanations.

Fixing Bugs
Bugzilla activity for the past 7 days:

• 122 new bugs were reported
• 48 bugs were reproducible and accepted (after duplicates removed)
• 6 bugs were fixed (4 previously reported bugs and 2 new bugs)
• As of today, there are 4,290 open bugs in Bugzilla

Forum Activity
Developer Forum activity for the past 7 days:

• 537 New Topics Created
• 274 New Topics received a reply
• Of those 274, 112 were replied to by a Facebook employee
• Of those 274, 74 were replied to by a community moderator

Arjun, an engineer on Platform, is thinking about creating Arjun-time, a time format that counts the seconds since his birth.