FBML Essentials

Chapter 3. FBML Reference

Throughout this chapter, I’ll cover the details of FBML, every single tag available at the time of this writing, and how each tag works. Please refer back to this chapter often as you write your FBML.

Letʼs start by showing how you can test these tags in your own browser without the need of a web server.

Facebook FBML Test Console

The Facebook FBML Test Console is an invaluable tool for any Facebook developer to test his FBML tags before putting them into production. Because Facebook has no true sandbox environment, every change to your application that you publish is available for any of your users to see (unless you have two versions of the same application, which is what a lot of developers end up doing). To help you avoid making errors in the Facebook Platform before your code goes live, Facebook has provided a test console for your FBML so that you can see what your code will look like when it gets rendered by Facebook.

To use this console, simply go to the Facebook developers website at http://developers.facebook.com and click on “Tools” in the top navigation. Youʼll see a series of test consoles you can play with. These include a console for the API, another for previewing the feeds you create, and—the one weʼre concerned with here—the FBML Test Console. Click on the “FBML Test Console” tab, and now you can test to your heartʼs content! If you want to skip these steps, this link will take you straight there: http://developers.facebook.com/tools.php?fbml ...