Hi alterna,

Are you saying that this works when you are using your Joomla app as an iframe within Facebook, but that it comes up with an error when it's NOT within Facebook?

Actually that makes sense... just change $_GET to @$_GET to suppress the warning that occurs when the URL parameter "fb_sig_api_key" is not present.

This is a really good way of detecting that you're inside Facebook - excellent! I take it that this only occurs on the first page of your site though, and that you have to use a session variable to store that info for the rest of the session?

Cheers,
Stephen

Hi alterna,

Thanks for the info about Facebook issues.

I've just released MetaTemplate 1.4. This has a few things you'll be interested in:

1 - you can now set up to 2 cookies or session variables per SUCCEED or FAIL action
2 - there's now a text box for entering the Referrer URL (just to save you using the PHP box for it)
3 - if you *do* use the PHP box, and return a template name, then the cookies and/or session variables will now get set (they didn't before)

Session variables are not going to work between different subdomains, sorry. This is an issue of cross-domain cookies. The session mechanism in Joomla is probably hard coded to not allow sharing of sessions between subdomains. It *may* be possible to set some sort of cross-domain temporary cookie using PHP code, in the SUCCEED action PHP box, but this depends on whether browsers allow it, and I haven't looked into this.

Best regards,
Stephen

Regarding the cache problem - yes, this is to be expected. The system cache plugin I think caches the output of pages according to URL, unless you are logged in. So if you do anything with the templates that does not vary according to URL (e.g. time of day, GeoIP, etc), then it's going to cache the page then serve out that same cached version to everyone even when the time or GeoIP location of the visitor changes. I'd like to investigate making a modified version of the cache that might allow you to make the cache take account of the variables that you use in your rule, where possible.

e.g. if you are using MetaTemplate (or MetaMod) rules that make a different version for people from FR and DE, and everyone else, then the cache should do a GeoIP lookup then do one cache for FR, one for DE, and one for everyone else. Of course, the more variables you use to control the template/content, the more complex this matrix becomes :-(  I am not sure how possible this is going to be.