Facebook API without client authentication for public content

api, authentication, facebook, php

Solution

As of September 2010, you can now authenticate just as an application, with no associated user. See http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/ for details. Or you can run this example code to get an access token:

curl -F grant_type=client_credentials \
 -F client_id=your_app_id \
 -F client_secret=your_app_secret \
 https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token

Problem

I'm developing a site for a client who already have the photos of his products on Facebook, and he wants the same albums to be replicated over his site. I was already using Facebook Connect, so I dropped a combination of `photos.getAlbums` and `photos.get` to dynamically make the galleries. So far so good, but then I realized that if there's no user logged trough FBC, no session is created and the API becomes unusable, even for content that is publicly available. I obviously want to show the albums to everyone and not just the people who connect their accounts. Is this how all functions in the Facebook API work? What's the best (easier to implement) workaround for this situation?

Original source