There are currently 29 bugs reported against the Facebook image caching mechanism. Some of these problems have been around for over a year, so there is valid reason to be concerned.

Fortunately there is a method you can use that forces Facebook to re-cache your image when calling setFBML.

By appending the current time to the image name, Facebook believes the image to be new and saves it as a new image.

<img src="http://www.mysite.com/images/image.jpg?refresh=<? echo time(); ?>" />

Use this on all your profile box images to ensure you always have valid content displayed.

However, for those application developers who want to go one step further, here is a description of how to support the profile box on the user’s Wall tab using the PHP library.

1. Client Library

First, make sure you have the latest client library. Visit the the Facebook client library wiki page for more information and a link to the download. Note that this library drops support for some old functions such as require_add, so if you haven’t kept your application up-to-date now is the time to do so. The PHP 5 version of the library contains the call you need. If you are using PHP 4 then you need to manually update the library call to look like this:

function profile_setFBML($markup, $uid = null, $profile=”, $profile_action=”, $mobile_profile=”, $profile_main=”) {
return $this->call_method(’facebook.profile.setFBML’, array(’markup’ => $markup,
‘uid’ => $uid,
‘profile’ => $profile,
‘profile_action’ => $profile_action,
‘mobile_profile’ => $mobile_profile,
‘profile_main’ => $profile_main));

2. Reset FBML

For the profile box to appear on the Wall tab you must load the FBML that will appear there. This is done using the same function that was used to load the old-style profile, only now there is a new parameter “profile_main”. In PHP, use the following code to load the profile boxes:

$fbml = "<fb:wide>This is a wide profile box on the Boxes tab.</fb:wide>";
$fbml .= "<fb:narrow>This is a narrow profile box on the Boxes tab.</fb:narrow>";
$fbml_main = "This is the Wall tab profile data";
$result = $facebook->api_client->profile_setFBML(NULL, $user_id, $fbml, NULL, NULL, $fbml_main);
echo "set FBML: result = ".var_export($result,true);


If your return code is NULL, all is well. If not, check the return codes documented on the wiki page.

3. Add to Profile Button

If you want to make it really easy for the user, program an “Add to Profile” button to appear on a canvas page. If the user has not yet added a profile box (on the Boxes or Wall tabs) and the FBML for profile_main was successfully loaded in step 2 then the button will appear. If there is already a profile box displayed, then the button will not appear. The code for the button is simple:

<fb:add-section-button section="profile" />


Note this cannot appear within the dashboard.

That’s it! You should now have the ability to display a profile box on either the Wall tab or the Boxes tab.