As a product and marketing guy I don’t often attempt (nor desire) to touch very much code. I’m thankful however to have been tasked with figuring out how to construct a fan/like-gate for PBS over the last several weeks. Freedom Riders by American Experience is the first show to offer up their content exclusively for fans of PBS on Facebook — check it out before the app comes down on May 13th.
I absolutely would not have been able to create this fan-gated experience without the knowledge shared by those who have attempted to build such a thing previously.
The actual construction of a rough in-Facebook fan-only experience was actually fairly straightforward using readily available tutorials across the blogosphere. The devil however, was in the details. You’ll find some of the resources that I used when creating PBS’ app below. Stay tuned though, we have plans to open-source our own script to make this process even easier. Watch for that announcement over on the Open.PBS blog.
Essential reading for creating a Facebook iFrame Tab
Fixing the Inevitable scrollbars that show up once you launch
Note: Be sure to read the comments on those posts as well, they’re as valuable (or maybe even more) than the posts themselves in some cases).