The Facebook FBML Test Console is an invaluable tool for any Facebook developer to test his FBML tags before putting them into production. Because Facebook has no true sandbox environment, every change to your application that you publish is available for any of your users to see (unless you have two versions of the same application, which is what a lot of developers end up doing). To help you avoid making errors in the Facebook Platform before your code goes live, Facebook has provided a test console for your FBML so that you can see what your code will look like when it gets rendered by Facebook.

To use this console, simply go to the Facebook developers website at http://developers.facebook.com and click on “Tools” in the top navigation. Youʼll see a series of test consoles you can play with. These include a console for the API, another for previewing the feeds you create, and—the one weʼre concerned with here—the FBML Test Console. Click on the “FBML Test Console” tab, and now you can test to your heartʼs content! If you want to skip these steps, this link will take you straight there: http://developers.facebook.com/tools.php?fbml.

The FBML Test Console enables you to specify any profile ID, any application API key, and any set of HTML, FBJS, and/or FBML code so that you can see how Facebook will render it. When you enter a bit of FBML code and click “Preview,” you will be shown the browser output, along with the rendered HTML and any errors for that output. See Figure 3-1.

Figure 3-1. The FBML Test Console

The rest of this chapter will serve as a reference for you as you write your FBML. I suggest reading through the chapter and trying out each of the tags in the FBML Test Console to see what they produce. There may be times when you donʼt want to use FBML but instead want to reproduce what the FBML would do as HTML. The Test Console is ideal for that. Practice using the tags described in this chapter with the FBML Test Console, and soon youʼll be a pro!