05 January 2013
Facebook Share button, or commonly known as sharer.php is the easiest way to share link on Facebook. It was initially deprecated in favour of the Like button while still keeping the documentation up for reference on https://developers.facebook.com/docs/share/. Now it is fully replaced by Feed Dialog. Facebook Share button no longer officially supported by Facebook. But it still functional and used by many all over the Internet.
It is easy to use. You don’t need an App ID, and you don’t need to include any Facebook dependencies. But because it is not supported and documented, you are bound to be surprised by any changes made by Facebook.
In my case, I want to include sharer.php on Malaysia Twitter Political Index. I want the user to be able to share it on Facebook, and I want to customize the title on daily basis. Previously you can just do this:
http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://bit.ly/myelection&t=Here's my customized title
But when I did that, I noticed Facebook no longer honour t parameter.
I could dynamically generate customized og tag, but due to Facebook caching mechanism there’s almost no point of doing that. A quick search led me to ‘How to pass custom parameters to a Facebook-”Share”-button’. That page listed down 4 undocumented params that can be used to customize the share page. Here’s my new link:
http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?s=100
&p[url]=http://bit.ly/myelection
&p[images][0]=http://election.gv.my/assets/vote.png
&p[title]=My customized title
&p[summary]=My customized summary
I assume you can add more image with p[images][1] to p[images][n]. I didn’t test it out.
Let’s test it out on this blog.
# With t paramater only
<a href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://ar.zu.my&t=Rock on Arzumy!">Share</a>
# With everything
<a href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?s=100
&p[url]=http://ar.zu.my
&p[images][0]=http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/2f8ec4a9ad7a39534f764d749e001046.png
&p[title]=Rock on Arzumy!
&p[summary]=In this blog, Arzumy will teach you how to rock!>Customized Share</a>
Go ahead test it out :)