Facebook API – Using fql_query to get status and fan count from pages

Using the Facebook API to get the latest status updates and fan count for a facebook page.

Written by Daniel, January 15, 2010

Today I needed to get the 5 latest status updates from a Facebook page. A client had asked me if I could create a widget for wordpress that would show the latest blog posts, tweets and facebook updates in one widget.

While the latest blog posts and tweets were easy enough to set up, I had a few kinks figuring out how to get the data from Facebook, without requiring a session key (i.e. without logging in to Facebook).

This took a while to dig out, and I tried around 5 different approaches before figuring out that it was pretty simple actually. The Facebook API documentation is just terrible…

include('facebook-platform/php/facebook.php');

class fbPageStatus
{
 public static function getStatusUpdates($fbkey, $fbsecret, $page_id)
 {
 $fb = new Facebook($fbkey, $fbsecret);
 $fql        = "SELECT message, updated_time FROM stream WHERE source_id = '" . $page_id . "'";
 $fbupdates    = $fb -> api_client -> fql_query($fql);
 return $fbupdates;
 }
}
// Usage:
var_dump(fbPageStatus::getStatusUpdates('7bc1ef16567735546bef620c32a23s76', 'ab3dfc4b7d8591f7ef2197ba754f16d1', '17975046895'));

Some simple FQL returns the result.

To get the number of fans, you would do:

$fql         = "SELECT fan_count FROM page WHERE page_id = '" . $page_id . "'";
 $fans         = $fb -> api_client -> fql_query($fql);

Hope someone will find this usefull.

EDIT: All keys are fake, obviously. Replace with your own.