Set Up Facebook Authentication

Password fatigue is a common problem with sites that require registration. In fact, a recent study found that 92% of shoppers abandon a website rather than go through the process of recovering a lost or forgotten password! However, if the website has a social media login option, they are 65% more likely to return. The same study showed that a majority of individuals prefer Facebook as their credential of choice. Luckily setting up a Rock website to use Facebook authentication is quick and easy.

Step 1: Create a Facebook App

Before you can add a Facebook login, your organization will need a Facebook "App". Visit the Facebook Developer website (https://developers.facebook.com/apps) to see the Apps that have been configured for your Facebook account. You'll need to designate someone’s personal Facebook account in your organization to use as the 'admin', but you can choose an organization’s email to be the contact email when setting this up. Meta redesigns these screens often, so the following steps cover only what Rock needs from your app. Follow Meta’s current prompts to find each setting:

1. Create an app for your organization and set it up to use Facebook Login.
2. In the Facebook Login settings, add each login page that shows the Facebook button to Valid OAuth Redirect URIs. Rock sends the page’s full address, including the port, so enter it the same way (for example, https://rock.rocksolidchurch.com:443/Login or https://rock.rocksolidchurch.com:443/page/207). Facebook only accepts HTTPS addresses, so the port is 443.
3. From the app’s basic settings, copy the App ID and App Secret. You’ll enter these in Rock in Step 2.
4. Rock asks Facebook for the public_profile and email permissions. When the Sync Friends setting is on (the default), it also asks for user_friends, which you’ll need to submit for Meta’s App Review before you take the app live. If you don’t need the Facebook Friend known relationship, turn off Sync Friends in Rock instead.

Step 2: Configure Rock

Now that you have a Facebook App, you can start configuring Rock to use the Facebook authentication. Follow these steps:

1. Activate the Facebook Authentication Service by navigating to the Admin Tools > Settings > Authentication Services > Facebook page.Enter the Facebook "App Id" and "App Secret" that you saved from the previous steps, and make sure that the service is Active. Save your changes.
2. Now enable the Facebook login on any of your login pages by updating the block settings of the login control to enable the "Facebook" external service provider. Having this block setting allows you to decide which of your sites allow Facebook to be used (some organizations may prefer not to allow Facebook to be used to login to their internal Rock site). Also make sure the "Redirect Page" setting is pointed to the default home page for your site. Once enabled, your login screen will now have an additional button to allow individuals to login using their Facebook account.

Now that you've enabled Facebook login, when someone logs in using Facebook, they will see a screen similar to the one below that links their Facebook account to your server.

When an individual's Facebook account is used for the first time Rock will apply the following logic to attempt to match the Facebook account to a Rock record.

1. If a person record can be found with the same First Name, Last Name and Email, the login is attached to this record. As an extra bonus, if no photo exists in Rock for this person their photo from Facebook will be added to their record in Rock.
2. If an exact match can't be made, a new record is created in Rock using the information from their Facebook account. The record status of this new individual is set to "Pending" so they will show up under the "Pending Individuals" report Tools > Reports | Organization > Data Integrity > Pending Individuals.

When a new person record is created as a result of a Facebook login, we'll pull the following information from Facebook:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Email
• Gender

Whenever they log in, we'll also do the following:

1. If the person doesn't have a photo in Rock and they do in Facebook, their Facebook photo will be added to Rock.
2. Their Facebook Media Link will be updated.
3. Any of their friends that have also logged into Rock using Facebook will be added as a Facebook Friend known relationship.