There are a few common reasons why your Facebook Feed might not be displaying. It’s recommended to go through the following potential issues before requesting support:
1) You’re trying to display posts from a personal profile
The easiest way to check whether you’re trying to display posts from a personal profile instead of a page is to view your page and see whether you have ‘Friends’, ‘Likes’ or ‘Members’. Profiles have ‘Friends’ and pages have ‘Likes’. If you have ‘Friends’ then it’s not a page, it’s a personal profile.
Solution:
Due to Facebook’s privacy policy you’re not able to use the plugin to display all of your posts from a personal profile, only from a Facebook , as posts from a personal profile are protected for privacy reasons. You may have limited success in displaying certain posts from a personal profile but most posts are not able to be displayed.
If you’re using the profile to represent a business, organization, product, public figure or something else other than yourself, then we’d advise converting your profile to a page per Facebook’s recommendation: http://www.facebook.com/help/175644189234902/, as there are many advantages to using pages over profiles. It is in fact against Facebook policies to use a profile to represent something other than yourself (see ‘Why should I convert my profile to a page’ in the link above).
Once you’ve converted to a page then the plugin should be able to retrieve and display all of your posts.
2)Â The Facebook page feed you are trying to display has restrictions on it
The feed you’re trying to display has to be a publicly accessible Facebook page. If your Facebook page has any restrictions on it (age or location) then it means that users are forced to sign into Facebook in order to view your page. This isn’t desirable for most pages as it means that it isn’t accessible by people who don’t have a Facebook account and that your page can’t be crawled and indexed by search engines.
An easy way to determine whether your page is set to public is to make sure you’re signed out of your Facebook account and then try to visit your page. If Facebook forces you to sign in to view your page then it has a restriction on it.
Solution:
You can remove any restrictions by logging into your Facebook account and going to the Settings for your page. You can then remove any Country Restrictions and Age restrictions (see screenshot). Once removed this will allow the Custom Facebook Feed plugin to access and display your posts.
Update: It is now possible to display posts from a page which has restrictions on it, so long as you are using a “Page” Access Token obtained from that specific Facebook page. To do this, you must have access to the Facebook page you are trying to display (i.e. have a role on the page). You can then use the big blue Facebook login button in our plugin to get a token for that Facebook Page. This button was added in version 2.7 of the free plugin and version 3.4 of the Pro plugin.
3) There aren’t any posts on your page, or the posts you do have are really old
If the posts on your page are 2-3 years old then they may not show up in the Facebook API and so may not be able to be displayed by the plugin.
Solution:
Try creating a brand new post on your Facebook page and see whether it then shows up in the Facebook feed on your website.
4) The plugin’s Customize settings weren’t saved successfully when the plugin was installed (WordPress plugin only)
Very occasionally on some sites an issue will occur where the plugin’s Customize setting defaults aren’t saved into your database when the plugin is first installed, which causes your posts not to be displayed. You can tell whether this is the case if your System Info from the plugin doesn’t have all of the Customize settings included. For example:
## CUSTOMIZE: ##
cff_ajax =>
cff_preserve_settings =>
cff_title_length =>
cff_body_length =>
cff_timezone => America/New_York
## FACEBOOK API RESPONSE: ##Solution:
Simply clicking the ‘Save Changes’ button on the plugin’s Customize page will save the settings into your database and resolve this problem.
5) Server configuration issue
In order to retrieve your posts from Facebook the plugin requires a few basic PHP modules which are enabled on the majority of web servers by default. If these are disabled on your web server then it may be the cause of the problem. You can check this by going to the plugin’s Settings page, clicking on the Help button and then scrolling down to your System Info section. In the section labeled ## SITE/SERVER INFO: ## you should see the three items highlighted below.
Solution:
If JSON is marked as No, then this means that JSON isn’t running on your website server. You should contact your web host to request that they turn this on as it is required in order to use this plugin and many others.
If both PHP allow_url_fopen and PHP cURL are marked as No then it means that both of these PHP extensions are disabled in your server’s php.ini file. Â If you are familiar with editing this file then you can enable one or both of them yourself, otherwise it’s recommended that you contact your web host and request that they enable one or both of these extensions on your server.
If cURL is marked as Yes then the plugin should still function as expected.
If PHP allow_url_fopen AND SSL Stream are marked as Yes than the plugin should still work as expected. If one of them is marked as no then you can enable them by editing your web server’s php.ini file. To enable allow_url_fopen you would need to edit the following line:
allow_url_fopen = On
To enable SSL stream you would need to need to uncomment (remove the semi-colon from the front of) the following line:
;extension=php_openssl.dll
6) A security setting on your web server is blocking your website from connecting to the Facebook API.
If you’ve gone through the troubleshooting steps above then there may be something blocking your website from connecting to the Facebook API.
Solution:
Refer to this post for more information on this issue and how to solve it.
7) There’s a filter being applied to your feed
See this FAQ for more information.
