I am thinking out loud and wondering if there is a way to have Facebook posts in a group or page automatically added to a forum and vice versa? I currently have a local community website and have a forum that doesn’t really have much activity as most of it’s users are on Facebook and use pages there for discussion.
What I am doing is reducing the usage of the forum part of my website and focusing on other areas, but would still like to have the discussion aspect on the site.
I am wondering if there is a way to have some type of system that creates a “category” on Facebook, maybe using the “Discussions” area of a FB page/group and then having those posts automatically added to a website in the form of a forum. And then when a reply is made at wither end, it is updated on both the website and FB.
I would like to know people’s thoughts on this and whether something like this would be possible?
I have had a quick look and it looks like there are ways to embed groups into page. Having looked quickly, I haven’t actually seen a demo of a group though, only pages.
So for requirements:
I would like users to be able to see the latest group discussions on my website, like a feed I guess
Not sure if it’s possible, but it would be great if users who are logged into FB can then reply to the topics/discussions through my website rather than bouncing off to FB, maybe through AJAX
I am basically wanting to create a community website for my town and have as much details, resources as possible so it becomes a go-to place for residents to find out information, businesses, events and jobs. I have tried having a forum before as an interim to this website, but it hasn’t taken off due to people using FB. My idea is to have FB enabled on my website so they can see the latest news/posts in my town so I would probably have a feed or a page with the latest posts on.
Any suggestions would be great on if this would work or not.
I am not extensively familiar with the Facebooks API.
Groups are basically a database and a UI. You should be able to share the database. Then the worst case is that you write two UIs, one for Facebook and another for the non-Facebook website.
I think however that you could share more of the code if your website were to expose a web service that the Facebook application could use. Then all the code that uses the database directly would not be in the Facebook application. Do you know what I mean?
Note that Nextdoor might be a quick and easy way to provide something for your community. Certainly you can create something better but that will require time.
