Docs    Facebook    Troubleshooting

My Facebook feed posts are not showing up, or all I can see is the Like box but no posts

There are a few common reasons why your Facebook feed embed might not be displaying. It’s recommended to go through the following checks 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 or group is to view your page and see whether you have ‘Friends’, ‘Likes’ or ‘Members’. Profiles have ‘Friends’, pages have ‘Likes’ and groups have ‘Members’. If you have ‘Friends’ then it’s not a page or a group, 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 page or a Facebook group, 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) 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) You’re using your own Facebook Access Token and it isn’t valid

Known issue: On May 8th, 2018, Facebook made a platform change which caused an issue with our plugin connecting to their API. To fix this issue, simply update the plugin to the latest version (Free: v2.7, Pro: v3.4.1) and click the big blue Facebook login button on the plugin’s settings page. This will then provide you with your own Access Token. If you’re having an issue updating the plugin then please see this FAQ.

 

4) You’ve entered an incorrect Page ID

Follow the directions on this page carefully to ensure that you’re using the correct Facebook ID.

 

5) 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.

 

6) 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.

 

7) 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 Support tab and then scrolling down to your System Info section. In the section labeled ## SITE/SERVER INFO: ## you should see the three items highlighted below.

system-info-2

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.  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

PHP Standalone Version

In the PHP Standalone version you need to open the fbfeed-settings.php file and uncomment the line at the bottom of the file which says // cff_system_info();. Once this line is uncommented then it will call the cff_system_info function which displays your system info at the top of your webpage when you view the feed:

Uncommenting the system info function in the PHP Standalone version

System Info displayed at the top of the webpage in the Standalone version

 

8) 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 and your Facebook Page ID works in the demo 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.

 

9) There’s a filter being applied to your feed

See this FAQ for more information.

If you’re still having trouble displaying your posts after trying the common issues above then please contact support for assistance.

support

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