Facebook Photos

For Ross D. and Jason T.

Installation Instructions

git clone https://github.com/kgust/vu-facebook.git
php composer.phar install If you don't have composer, see getcomposer.org.
Create your database instance.
Enter your database configuration values in config.php.
Create the photos table (see schema.sql).
Run php fetch.php to pull photo data from the Vanderbilt Photo stream. This can be run as many times as you wish (daily via CRON?), it will insert or update the values as appropriate.
Configure your webserver to route all links to index.php. I used Nginx with PHP-FPM. Alternatively, you can use the PHP built-in webserver. php -S 127.0.0.1:8000 index.php

Summary

Task 1: Retrieve a list of list of photos from the Facebook Graph API.

Start by looking at fetch.php to see the downloading and parsing logic.

Task 2: Create an interface that displays a list of photos and allows user to view details.

Look index.php for the routes and the src/ directory for the interface controllers and views.

My Process

I took the long route developing this but had a lot of fun creating it and learned more about the framework bootstrapping process.

I rejected the idea of three simple procedural scripts. While they would be simple to create, do not show the style of work that I'm used to now. Plus mixing view, database, and business logic into a single file is more like 2005 than 2015. Oh, and the URLs would be really ugly.

Let's call this a micro-microframework. I started by researching the route package by The League of Extraordinary Packages. This is my only dependency. Using route allowed me to organize my code into the familar Model-View-Controller pattern.

I don't actually have the model layer. I'm using a DatabaseProvider to load the PDO class. My use case is simple enough that I didn't need to create models. Views also are simple, HTML files with embedded PHP.

I had no prior experience with the Facebook Graph API and found that getting the data that I wanted was more challenging than I initially anticipated. The API, by default, only provides 25 items in a collection (e.g. 25 photos or 25 Like nodes).

Learning the Facebook paging process gave me access to all of the photos. Applying the same process to the Like nodes gave me a Like count. However, the fetching process was very slow and my Like counts were off.

PHP and Nginx both have a 30 second limit for running PHP scripts. I changed my fetching logic, moving the code into a command-line script that runs mostly outside the framework.

I resolved the Like count problem and the performance problems when I discovered that the Facebook Graph API can produce summaries. I now had accurate Like counts and eliminated the Like node paging. This also fixed the performance issues.