Auto-publish WP posts to Facebook

So, how do you auto-publish your WordPress posts to your Facebook page? I found two plugins  (there may be others) that will do this, and neither of them were perfect, but I can’t code PHP, soooo…

I first tried WordBooker and ultimately settled on Publish To Facebook and I’ll explain why a little later in this article.

WordBooker worked great, but I really disliked all of the permissions it wanted from me as a Facebook application. Once I had installed the plugin and activated it, here’s what WordBooker wanted me to agree to.

WordBooker is requesting permission to:

  • Send me email
  • Wordbooker may email me directly·
  • Post to my Wall
  • Wordbooker may post status messages, notes, photos, and videos to my Wall
  • Access posts in my News Feed
  • Access my data any time
  • Wordbooker may access my data when I’m not using the application
  • Manage my pages
  • Wordbooker may login as one of my Pages
  • Access my profile information
  • Groups and Facebook Status

I wasn’t at all thrilled at this list, but  as it was an experiment, I went for it. After clicking Allow, I got sent back to my WordPress Dashboard/ Settings/WordBooker Blog Level Customization page. There are a ton of options here! I only changed two things. I checked the box next to Default Publish Post to Facebook and further down the page, changed the size of the excerpt to 300 characters.

It worked perfectly, but because of all of the permissions I wasn’t happy. I did uncheck all of the permissions it was requesting inside my Facebook/Application Settings page, but then of course, the plugin stopped working. So, off I went to look for something else that didn’t feel as intrusive.

The Publish to Facebook plugin is a simple, straight-forward little tool that shares your posts to FB without intrusive data mining. If you’re active on the web and often share stories from external sites to facebook, you’ll be very familiar with how this plugin works.

Once the plugin is installed, every time you publish a post,  you will be brought to the Facebook login page and, after logging in, the article will be added to the Mini-Feed section of your profile.  It’s not perfect….I found that once I published to facebook, I had a hard time getting back to my WP Dashboard….but I’m ok with it for now until something better comes along.