Today at work, we’ve begun looking into creating some Bebo applications. I know it’s a bit behind in the times, but we’ve been busy with Facebook, iPhone, and Google Gadgets. It’s now time to sink our teeth into Bebo.
I spent about 30 minutes setting up Bebo and reviewing a simple three step process to setup external authentication and it didn’t work! Not only that, when I went to download the API I had to actually right-click and choose “Save As” because it just loaded the whole API as text in my browser. Talk about a shotty setup.
The API download problems aside, let me tell you more about my authentication problem. The three step example I followed is from this URL here: http://www.bebo.com/docs/auth
*** I apoligize if any of the code below is incorrect, I’m typing by memory on this one ***
So, I begin by instatiating the Bebo API:
$bebo = new Bebo($apikey, $secretkey);
Next, I get an auth token like the instructions say:
$token = $bebo->create_authToken();
Now, I create a link that goes to the login.php page on Bebo. I do as they say and pass in my API key and auth token. I also pass in a next URL.
On the page where my next URL is, I re-instatiate the Bebo client and I get the auth token from the URL. And like step 3 says I get the session:
$session = $bebo->auth_getSession($_GET['auth_token']);
print_r($session);
Great, all set according to the three steps. So I load the first page in my browser and click the link. I’m now directed to the Bebo login page. I log in with my username and password. I now need to give access to my application. There is also a checkbox on this page, that is not clear, but I assume it to be the “infinite session” they keep talking about. It’s checked by default, so I leave it as is and press the “Yes” button.
After all of this I get redirected back to my “next” page that I specified and my print_r of session reveals that “the app is not visible to me”???? Not sure WTF this means. I continue tinkering around for a bit and I randomly decided to uncheck the “infinite session” checkbox and press yes. Guess what, it worked, now I have a valid session.
I’m now thinking that, ok, it’s not going to be such a big deal because I remember reading about an option to hide the checkbox. I go and update my link to add hide_checkbox=true. Try the process all over again. Guess what? The checkbox is still there…
At this point I’m at a loss and we will make a decision tomorrow about whether to continue with Bebo, because it does not look promising so far.
If anyone has encountered something similar and solved it, let me know, I would be grateful.
having exactly the same problems… little to no docs and next param and hide_checkbox don’t work for me either. I’ll keep going and let you know if I have any progress
Sounds interesting. Thanks for info .I like You Now! (sounds weird.. should say I follow you Now!.. )
This is great! It really shows me where to expand my blog. I think that sometime in the future I might try to write a book to go along with my blog, but we will see…Good post with useful tips and ideas
IN case anyone else has this problem, basically the issue of ‘this app is not visible to you’ comes from the application settings – setting the app to public beta rather than private beta will allow your site to access the session.
i can add friends because on my beobo account it says solve captcha but i dont know where to solve at