Creating "Like" buttons for arbitrary elements on my site, and reading back the status - possible?

Question

I'm a total newbie to Facebook programming and would like to know, as a follow-up to this question, whether the following is possible.

I have a collection of events on a web site. I'm fetching them from several RSS feeds, and have total freedom in how to output them - e.g. as single pages, so there is a permalink for every event.

I would like to

1. Create a Facebook "like" button for each of the events without entering them into the Facebook system in any way

2. Read back the "like" status of the current user for any one of those events via JavaScript or on server side so I can display these events in a "events I like" list. The important thing is that I need to be able to read the status later = on subsequent page requests, not only in the moment the user clicks the "like" button.

@karim79's answer does answer the first part, but not the second yet.

this page contains all the information I need to create the button: Social plugins > Like button there also is an FBML event to react to when somebody signs up. But that still doesn't enable me to check the "like" status of a returning user.

Is there any way to do that?

Answer 1

A brain-dead way of automatically generating 'like' links for your site (which I recently implemented - so I know works) would be to simply generate the 'href' parameter which (facebook's) like.php reads from the iframe source. Just build the iframe code using their widget thingie and use PHP to dynamificate the href parameter:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<?php echo urlencode($url); ?>%2F&amp;layout=button_count&amp;show_faces=false&amp;width=50&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;height=21" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:75px; height:21px;" allowTransparency="true"></iframe>

You can customise it to a limited extent, just see the attributes list right under the button creation widget.

Using fbml (which I was too lazy to incorporate, and somewhat reluctant due to the fact that I would have had to include yet-another-library):

<fb:like width="200" show_faces="no" href="<?php echo $url; ?>"></fb:like>

There's a neat list of examples here: http://fbrell.com/xfbml/fb:like