For the past two years, breaking changes introduced to Facebook have been on a three month schedule with new changes announced each month. Developers had 90 days to implement the changes before they became permanent fixtures of the Facebook development platform. 2013 is bringing a new change to that schedule that will give developers more time to address these breaking changes.

Facebook announced that its bundling breaking changes into a single quarterly update. Now developers will know every single breaking change being introduced to the platform for the quarter on the same day instead of having to wait for new updates each month. This means that developers will have the full quarter to implement all of the breaking changes without having to worry about new changes being introduced all the time.

The change to a quarterly schedule will start in April when the breaking changes for July are announced. For now, developers will want to focus on implementing the following breaking changes scheduled to go live in April:

Removing ability to POST to USER_ID/questions
As it’s no longer possible for users to create questions, we will remove this functionality from the Graph API. POSTs to USER_ID/questions will fail.

Removing version property/column
We will remove the ‘version’ column from the ‘group’ FQL table and the ‘group’ Graph API object.

Announced back in October, a number of breaking changes will also become permanent on January 9. Developers will want to make sure they have taken care of the following before then:

Finally, 115 bugs were reported this week, and 54 were accepted for further review. Twenty-free bugs were also fixed. You can check out the full list at the blog post.