We wanted to link this blog using Social Media. Hey why not? It’s what’s going to help this blog be known and will have all the great infos shared between people.
So we were interested to link to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, … .
To get started the most obvious plugin was the Official Facebook Plugin. For us using the official, is always the best thing to do, because it’s supposed to be the most up to date version. So even if the plugin didn’t have a great review, wasn’t that user friendly, we sticked with it. The main goal for us was to have likes (hey BTW don’t forget to like us), but also to post those blog posts on our Timeline on Facebook. The plugin did the job.
But we also wanted to be on twitter, Google +, and Pinterest. We did find this plugin “Really simple Facebook and Twitter share buttons“, it’s supposed to be great, add little buttons below or above the posts. It also has other features and you can also share on other social media (even Facebook). So that was our choice.
We were able to make the 2 plugins work together, with no effort, so we were happy campers.
And then came the time of updates. The Facebook plugin had an update version available, and since it wasn’t that great we decided to go for the update, hoping they had improved it. The update was quite easy as usually updates are when dealing with WordPress. So we decided to get a ‘Tour’ of the new improved feature.
We clicked on the plugin tab and bam “Fatal error: Call to undefined function fb_admin_dialog() in /home/wphelpcl/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/facebook/admin/settings.php on line 328”
What the heck is going on? Yes, the plugin crashes, and no help. So first reflex we went to WordPress.org and checked the support to see if people had asimilar issue, because of course such an issue should happen to tons of people. No luck. Oh boy, you feel alone in those moments, you had a great site and suddenly, not anymore.
So since we do a lot of programming, we looked at the code, and nothing obvious. The next thing to do is to check at conflicts. In the code the Facebook plugin tries to look for conflicting plugins, but our experience told us that it’s better to double check 🙂  So since our site doesn’t use that many plugins we decided to disable all of them except the Facebook one. And tada!! the plugin worked. So it was a plugin conflict.
Now let’s find which conflict. I am sure by now, you know which one, but to figure it out, you need to enable each plugin one by one and check if everything is OK. So the bad plugin was “Really simple Facebook and Twitter share buttons”. It’s conflicting with the Facebook plugin, even so we didn’t enable the Facebook option in Really simple Facebook and Twitter share buttons !  We did look at the Facebook plugin code, and they have a list of incompatible plugins, they check if those plugins are installed and if any they are supposed to show a Facebook window, but they forgot to load the api for that Window. Bad programming, bad.
Come on Facebook it’s time to raise your game.
Bottom line, we can’t use those two plugins together. We need to find a new solution. We have seen those kinds of issues over and over and over. It would be easy to blame “Really simple Facebook and Twitter share buttons”, since it’s because of that plugin that the Facebook plugin is not working, but the reality is that it’s Facebook fault, because first Facebook is  trying to blame other people plugins by declaring them incompatible, secondly they should test their code. The fix is quite simple, but I guess some people would have to rethink the way they do development.
Anyway, another problem solved by the WP Help Club. Don’t use “Really simple Facebook and Twitter share buttons” and Facebook plugin together and now…  you know the rest of the story. Good day 🙂
