Emanuele Feronato

Talking about Facebook and Php.

Welcome to the 5th step.

Let’s make a small recap:

Step 1: Creation of the application itself

Step 2: Publishing a text on the user’s status

Step 3: Publishing text, links and images on the user’s wall

Step 4: Inviting friends to use the application

Now it’s time to make the application post a notification to users you invite to join the app.

I mean this one:

The script now is this one:

require_login();

$friends = $facebook->api_client->friends_get();

echo "
Hello , you have ".count($friends)." friends";

foreach($friends as $friend){
     $infos.=$friend.",";
}

$infos = substr($infos,0,strlen($infos)-1);

$gender=$facebook->api_client->users_getInfo($infos,'sex');

$gender_array = array(); 

foreach($gender as $gendervalue){
     $gender_array[$gendervalue[sex]]++;
}

$male = round($gender_array[male]*100/($gender_array[male]+$gender_array[female]),2);
$female = 100-$male;

echo "
Males: $male%
Females: $female%
";

$message = "has ".count($friends)." friends. $male% of them are male. $female% are female";

$image = array();
$image[type]="image";
$image[src]="http://www.gamemummy.com/facebook/genderz_demo/genderz.png";
$image[href]="http://apps.facebook.com/genderz_demo/";

$attachment = array();
$attachment[name] =  "Try the application!!";
$attachment[href] = "http://apps.facebook.com/genderz_demo/";
$attachment = "{*actor*} has ".count($friends)." friends";
$attachment[description] = "powered by genderz_demo";
$attachment[media] = array($image);

$has_permission = $facebook->api_client->users_hasAppPermission("publish_stream");

if(!$has_permission){
     echo "
Publish results on your wall!!";
}
else{
     $facebook->api_client->stream_publish($message,$attachment);
}

if(isset($_POST[ids])){
     $message = "is inviting you to use genderz_demo!! Try it!";
     $ids_list = implode(",",$_POST[ids]);
     $facebook->api_client->notifications_send($ids_list,$message,'user_to_user');
     echo "

Thank you for inviting ".count($_POST[ids])." friends to genderz_demo";
}
else {

?>

" >
      

Lines 68-74 are the same we added at Step 4, but they are in an else condition because they will appear only if I don’t have a variable called ids passed with POST (line 58).

This means I show the invite friends selector only if I haven’t already invited some friends, because when I submit an invitation form, an ids variable is passed with an array containing all of the user IDs of the people I invited.

Now let’s see what happens at lines 59-62, executed only once I submitted the request form.

Line 59: writing my note. Notice as my note stats with “is inviting” and not with “Emanuele Feronato is inviting”, because when I specify user_to_user in the note mode at line 61, the API will add my name by itself.

Line 60: transforming an array into a comma separated value string of all of the user IDs of the people I invited.

Line 61: notifications_send takes as input the list created at line 60, the message created at line 59 and sends the note as user_to_user as explained before.

Finally, line 62 thanks the user for sending some spam :)

And the application is finished… during next step I’ll show you how to finetune it in order to make it seem a professional application, then we’ll see the hardest part: monetization.

Try the application