Facebook Connect

I upgraded from 4.21 to 4.261 yesterday primarily because of my interest in Facebook Connect. I went through all the steps -- I upgraded my Comments, Comment Detail and Userpic template modules to those that ship with motion. I created the two new javascript templates (motion.js and motion_mt.js) and upgraded my mt.js to the 4.261 version. I pulled in jquery via the google API (though that's not in the readme for the Facebook plugin at all) and added what seems like five other javascript files motion is using to handled things like ajax calls, hiding/displaying the comment form and just somewhat oddly to me, separate time and date functions. All said -- just based on the defaults that ship with motion -- I'm pulling in so many javascript files just for MT that it's ridiculous. The default Motion templates still have tags in them that say indicate those templates were supposed to bec combined at some point, but never were.

The order of how those templates are called matters a lot, as even moving one below the other will brake various functions of the comment form. After all that, I've I can successfully authenticate through Facebook Connect (though not in Google Chrome, it seems to stop at the callback point) and I can post comments. The "use comment comnfirmation" setting has to be checked for motions AJAX comments to work. That took forever to figure out. After registering a template bundle at Facebook and getting it added to my Connect settings, the plugin's send story call works and I can get it to publish stories at Facebook (which from reading online is something a lot have had trouble with).

Were I'm running into trouble is when has not connected to Facebook through my blog or logged out -- something interrupts the call the pulls in the Facebook userpic and name. I've looked and the the plugin is sending the right user id to Facebook, but the JSON string being returned has all NULL values. Something in the javascript is also adding two "reply" links to each comment as well. In Firebug, I get this error on line 27 of signface.js --
result is null
anonymous()signface.js (line 27)
for (var i = 0; i

To make matters worse, the result is different on page reloads. Sometimes I get a default userpic with the actual commenters name, sometimes I get a question mark picture and it just says "Facebook User" in place of the commenter.

I tried -- to no avail -- stripping out other javascript files en masse and one by one, in case there was a conflict, but nothing worked.

Here's a page where you can see it all for yourself: http://justinmclachlan.com/2009/07/777/facebook-connect/

And yes, I understand this is supposedly a beta plugin. I just can't believe it ships as part of motion in the state it's in, with next to know documentation at all.

thanks,
Justin