How can I check to see if the user has Facebook Timeline?

Question

I want to enable certain features only for users with the "publish_actions" permission and Timeline. How can I detect if the user enabled Timeline?

Answer 1

Currently there is no API way to check if user have enabled timeline.

You can try to use "Add To Timeline (beta)" social plugin (passing publish_actions as perms) in combination with Facebook JS-SDK Events.

Subscribe to auth.login, auth.authResponseChange and/or auth.statusChange events and check status property of response passed to event listener, once event fired and user is connected you can publish action and if succeed mark user as one who have timeline installed.

This however have some downsides:

• Better be sure not to ask users for publish_actions in flows other than "Add To Timeline" social plugin to be sure they are have both timeline and permission granted.
• You should be publishing action to ensure that they have granted permissions to do so, since those events can be other user actions (like password change or Facebook user switching, etc...).