My soup

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

• Chili Pepper Design - Reveal / Fan-Gate / Like-Gate Facebook iFrame tab tutorial with PHP
• Wildfire Social Media Marketing - Free iFrames app for Facebook page owners; an easy-to-use replacement for Facebook’s deprecated FBML app
• Stack Overflow - Fan-Gate, Like-Gate, show-to-connections, with javascript and like box?
• Hyper Arts Tutorial: Add an iFrame Application to your Facebook Fan Page – 2011 Edition http://www.hyperarts.com/blog/adding-iframe-application-to-facebook-fan-page/
• Hyper Arts - Customizing your Facebook iFrame Application – Reveal Tabs, Fan-gating, & Other Cool Stuff
• (Anti) Social Development - How to Make a Custom Facebook Page Tab with iFrames

Fixing the Inevitable scrollbars that show up once you launch

• HyperArts - Facebook iFrame Apps – Getting Rid of Those Scrollbars
• (Anti) Social Development - How to Remove the Scrollbars from the Facebook Custom Tab iFrame
• Ken Hood - Facebook iFrame Apps – Eliminating Scrollbars

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).