Facebook fanpage need more kick? Check out FBML

Whenever you need to implement a facebook fanpage for yourself or for your business the first thing you want to do is customize it. So you changed your profile picture and added some details about the brand or the person but, it’s still the same page as everyone else. Luckily there is an app called Static FBML (Facebook Markup Language) that you can add to your facebook fanpage. This allows you to make some customizations to a specific page but isn’t a full blown application so anyone that can use some HTML can do it. So in order to see what you can do with this app on a facebook page I selected a few resources as well as some great examples of good static FBML usage. You should install FBML here.

Resources:

Facebook Developer Wiki

The developer Wiki has everything you need for making a page with FBML. They have tons of resources, API’s, dev resources and more.

Facebook Starter Kit

This kit gives you a ‘hello world’ template for building ColdFusion applications for Facebook. It is very much a barebones project, enabling you to easily modify and add to it and use it in the way you like to build ColdFusion applications. This is deliberate; its purpose it to get you passed the first hurdle of dealing with facebook, leaving the application framework design up to you.

FBML – Facebook Markup Language

A nice little slide rocket presentation about FBML. A quick crash course or a good starting point.

Static FBML: Not Every Facebook Fan Page Needs an Application

An article about using Static FBML vs. Regular FBML which is also a great case study from the designer of the Sunkist soda facebook fanpage. It provides some really good content and some really good rules of thumb. Also, it

FBML Essentials

Do you have an idea for a Facebook application? With FBML Essentials, you’ll learn how to build it quickly using the Facebook Markup Language (FBML) and other easy-to-use tools in the site’s framework. This book not only gets you started with this toolkit, you also get a complete reference on every FBML tag Facebook has ever written, with advice on the best ways to use these tags in your code.

Comparing Flash iFrame and FBML Facebook applications

A table from adobe that summarizes the differences when creating your Flash Platform application as an iFrame or FBML Facebook application. The two most significant differences are the ability to control the embedding of a Flash object and the ability to access scripts.

Examples:

Sunkist Soda

Twilight

Southwest Airlines

Nissan

Mountain Dew

Honda

Harley Davidson

Dunkin’ Donuts

Coca Cola