Manage App Roles with Facebook Groups

As recently mentioned, we are continuing to release new features that address feedback that we have heard from you as part of Operation Developer Love.

Today we are announcing the ability to add and create Facebook Groups within the Developer App to manage users who are Administrators, Developers, Insights Users, and Testers in your app. With this feature, adding users to a role across different apps has become much simpler. For example, you may have a QA team to test your apps. Instead of having to repeatedly add the QA team users as Testers on each app, you can now create a “QA team” Group from the Developer App with these users and add this Group to the “Tester” section.

To get started, go to the Roles page on the Developer App. Click the “Add” link in the appropriate section (Administrators, Developers, Testers, Insights Users) to add a Group.

After clicking on the “Add” link, the dialog below appears where you can type in the name of a closed or secret Group that you admin.

You can also click on the link in the dialog (i.e., Create a Group for Testers) to create a new Group. On the “Create Group” dialog, you can specify the Group name, members, and privacy (Closed or Secret). To learn more about Facebook Group settings, click here. If you create a Group, you are automatically added as the Group Admin.

After adding or creating a Group, you will see the Group (e.g., QA Team) appear in the appropriate section:

Whenever a Group is added to a role for an app, an email is sent to the Update Notification email (found in the Security section of the Advanced tab) and group members will also receive a notification on Facebook that a post has been made to the Group.

Clicking on the notification will take you into the Group where the recently added role (e.g., Testers) and app (e.g., New Test) are posted.

We have started making these features available in the Developer App to a small set of developers today and plan to make them available to all developers over the next week. We look forward to your feedback and questions in the comments below.