Facebook Plugin for WordPress

Development Era Context: This post from 2009 represents the early days of social media integration with content management systems. The casual mention of developers creating their own solutions reflects how nascent the ecosystem was - before official APIs and standardized social plugins.

Blake, a PHP engineer at Squidoo, has a blog called The Why and the How. You should check it out, he writes really good articles and shares great

My friend and coworker Aaron Collegeman decided to write a WordPress plugin that automatically replaces the built-in WordPress commenting system with Facebook's.

Technical Innovation: Replacing WordPress's native commenting system with Facebook's was revolutionary in 2009. It addressed a major pain point - comment spam and user authentication - by leveraging Facebook's real identity system. This was before Facebook's official comment plugin, making it a pioneering third-party solution.

It is under active development and will eventually it will s backend upport storage of comments, but for now you can do everything from Facebook. In the meantime, you should a grab a copy and see it in action for yourself.

Facebook Comments for Wordpress.

Historical Artifact: The mention of Google Code (code.google.com) as the hosting platform is a telling detail - this was before GitHub's dominance in open source hosting. Google Code was shut down in 2015, making this link a digital archaeological artifact of the pre-GitHub era.