At the last Palo Alto Facebook Developer’s Garage, the Facebook Platform and Connect teams announced the 3-6 month developer’s roadmap. This roadmap is publicly available on the Facebook developers site. This is an effort to keep the developers who are building applications and games well informed and not surprised by any of the changes.
Two of the changes in particular that will affect your Facebook Fan Pages is the removal of boxes and narrowing of application tabs from 760px to 520px. This will result in Fan Page administrators only being able to customize content in application tabs and those tabs being narrower. The narrowing of the application width is a result of changes to the upcoming design of profiles and pages. If you read the posts on Facebook’s developer wiki, you’ll see more explanation as to why they are making these changes and what’s in store for the future. There are two posts on this topic: Facebook – Tabbed Profile and Roadmap Profile. According to the roadmap, these changes will take effect in late 2009/early 2010.
What does this mean if you have already customized your fan page and created a custom tab? Chances are your content will be cut-off or appear distorted. If you used Sprout to create the custom content on your fan page, you can make the appropriate size edits to your sprout and then republish it. The FBML code has a height and width attribute which will also need to be changed. We will create a video tutorial for this when the time comes.
If you are developing on the Facebook Platform, as we are, I highly encourage that you keep a close eye on the Facebook developer’s roadmap.
Leave a response