Accessing Facebook info via CCK content type

Thanks Dave,

This is obvious now that I have read some more about themes, cck and contemplate and then read over your theme to see how you've done things.
In the interest of any future readers I have decided that ConTemplates is the wrong approach (as other people seem to also indicate). Themes are the way to go.

Before I go on... thanks to:
Agaric Design: http://agaricdesign.com/theming-cck-the-agaric-way
Drupal: http://drupal.org/node/62462
and CCK/theme/README.txt
(and of course Facebook for Drupal - great work Dave, its been 4 days and I almost have a working app)

So you can override the CCK html rendering by creating a themes/fb_fbml/node-content_type.tpl.php template (content_type is the name of your content type). Maybe you will want to have a different test content_type to initially publish a CCK field. That way you can get the html format and adjust as you like.... or use something like print $field_my_field[0]['view'];

Then include any new internal facebook variables by adding them to fb_fbml/template.php function _phptemplate_variables (in hook = node section)
You can then use the new variable $variable in the node-content_type.tpl.php.

Easy when you finally dig into how this stuff works. See CCK/theme/node-content_example.tpl.php for an example.

You will loose some of the functionality of the Content Types > Display Fields, but that kind of goes without saying since you are creating your own template.
However note that CCK has a CCK/theme/README.txt which explains how to just override a CCK field template if thats all you want to do. This way you can keep the Display Fields "Administration" control (if your content writers need some control but can't write php) while still changing the resulting html.

Oh, By the way. Any hints on a good way to modify your template.php without causing headaches when upgrades come along? Im thinking about calling a function in another php file, so that the changes to your file are minimal, any better or standard ways of doing this?

Thanks. that might work well.

If anyone is interested getting the fb_app and fbu in template.php is easy (once you figure out that $vars['uid'] is the article author, not the viewer)

$search = array('apikey' => 'yourkey');
or
$secret = array('nid' => $your_fb_app_node_id);
$fb_app = fb_get_app($search);
$fbu_viewer = fb_get_fbu($user->uid,$fb_app);

by the way - there is some code in there for viewing the author's picture.... but I can't see how it would work without getting the $fb_app as I have shown above.

Updated Version to 2.x.