openid

Reply to OpenID for WP

On 14 April 2006, Matt Mullenweg said:

OpenID for WordPress plugin

This weekend I was experimentally reimplenting how my blog displays comments. For testing I needed to find an old post with both trackbacks and pingbacks on it. I found my post that you linked, here, and was delighted to be reminded that despite both of our blogs changing domain name (from photomatt.net to ma.tt and from blog.scatmania.org to danq.me, respectively), all the links back and forth still work perfectly because clearly we share an apporopriate dedication to the principle that Cool URIs Don’t Change, and set up our redirects accordingly. 🙌

Incidentally, this was about the point in time at which I first thought to myself “hey, I like what Matt’s doing with this Automattic thing; I should work there someday”. It took me like a decade to a decade-and-a-half to get around to applying, though… 😅

Anyway: thanks for keeping your URIs cool so I could enjoy this trip down memory lane (and debug an experimental wp_list_comments callback!).

OpenID For WordPress

Update: 12th October 2007 – this project is to be considered abandoned. Please see How To Set Up OpenID For WordPress Comments instead. Thanks for the support and for your interest in OpenID.

THIS IS ALL HORRIBLY OUT OF DATE. THE DOWNLOAD LINKS DON’T WORK, I KNOW. GET OVER IT. More seriously now, I am working on a new version of this that actually works as a WordPress 2.0.x plugin. It’s very nice, but it’s not finished. Watch this space. In the meantime, why not take a look at OpenID Comments For WordPress (which is based on my preliminary work, here). Thanks for all the attention, guys.

As promised, I’m releasing the first usable version (v0.4) of my WordPress OpenID plugin tool. It’s very, very messy and a little buggy. Plus, installing it requires that you hack a few PHP files… use at your own risk. You’ll need a WordPress v1.5 weblog. Download this package and decompress it to your WordPress directory. It will create an openid_icons directory, a file called openid.php (the main codebase), and a file called openidform.php (the form that appears on your blog). Edit openid.php and substitute your own weblog URL in at the appropriate places (near the top). Link in the login form wherever you like. I’ve done so in my theme’s “sidebar.php” file, with the following code: <?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/openidform.php'); ?> In your main index.php, add a line to include the openid.php file. This will allow logins and logouts to be processed. Something like this: <?php require_once('openid.php'); ?> In wp-comments-post.php (the comments processor), substitute the following code in under “// If the user is logged in”: // If the user is logged in get_currentuserinfo(); if ( $user_ID ) { $comment_author = addslashes($user_identity); $comment_author_email = addslashes($user_email); $comment_author_url = addslashes($user_url); } elseif ($_SESSION['sess_openid_auth_code'] != "") { $comment_author = addslashes($_SESSION['sess_openid_auth_code']); $comment_author_email = "openid@example.com"; $comment_author_url = addslashes($_SESSION['sess_openid_auth']); } else { if ( get_option('comment_registration') ) die( __('Sorry, you must be logged in to post a comment.') ); } Notice the extra section, relying upon $_SESSION[‘sess_openid_auth_code’]. That’s the magic bit. And it should ‘just work’. Let me know if it doesn’t; I’ll be improving the codebase over the coming weeks and I’d like to include your suggestions. If you need any help setting it up, I can probably help with that too, or even with adapting the code to work with other applications (than WordPress). Features so far:

Authenticate OpenID users
Easily authenticate OpenID users from particular servers, including members of LiveJournal, DeadJournal, and Level9
Authenticated OpenID users can post comments

Features to come:

Cookie-based “remember me”
Ability to authenticate WordPress users (e.g. the weblog owner) by an OpenID
“Friends Only” protected posts, which can only be read by certain authenticated users
AJAX-powered log-in (to save users from having their browsers redirected excessively, and because it can be made to look swish), where supported

If you want to help code, just drop me a message.

OpenID And Scatmania

Over the last few weeks I’ve playing playing with an exciting new technology known as OpenID. Do you remember Microsoft Passport and it’s opposite number, Liberty Alliance? Well; we all know that these services weren’t all they cracked up to be. They claimed to be “distributed log-on services”, but in actual fact they were centralised log-on services (controlled, for example – in the case of Passport – by Microsoft – do you want Microsoft to know everything you do on the web?), and not really distributed at all…

…OpenID really is a distributed log-on service. Anybody can set up an OpenID server and start giving out OpenID accounts. If you have a weblog with LiveJournal, for example, you already have one, and soon folks on other similar blogging services will have them too.

I’d love to see a future where OpenID catches on, because it really is a beautiful and elegant (from a technical point of view) way of doing things, and it’s really easy to use from a user’s point of view, too. I’ve spent a little while implementing the beginnings of a WordPress (the blogging engine that powers this site) plug-in, and it’s taking shape: if you look in the upper-right of the page, you should find that you’re able to log in to this web site using your LiveJournal account. That means that WordPress users like myself, in future, should be able to do things like LiveJournal’s “friends only” posts, and allow LiveJournal users to make comments in a way that proves they are who they say they are, and many other benefits, too.

But, of course, it doesn’t stop there: DeadJournal will be next. Then TypePad. Then Blogger and the forum sites – phpBB and the like. Then the wiki sites. All of these sites will be able to authenticate against one another, and make content private, or accessible, without having to have silly “sign up” systems of the type we’re starting to see everywhere these days.

It’s all very exciting, but it’s early days for now. Right now, my WordPress plugin doesn’t do a lot – you can log in and out, and that’s about it. But give me a go, and tell me what you think – log in to my blog using your LiveJournal account, and give me some feedback. And when I finally get this code to a production level (right now it’s buggy as hell), I’ll release it as a WordPress plugin, and the world will be great.