Supporting OpenID, part 1: Enabling the WPMU site to be used as an OpenID provider
December 28th, 2007 by Dan York
I am a big fan of OpenID for a range of reasons, some of which I articulated here, “Why bloggers should learn about OpenID“, and others I have outlined in my other blogging about identity issues and discussed in a Security Round Table podcast about OpenID (the show notes for this podcast, by the way, provide a very large compilation of links to learn all about OpenID). So an objective I have is to make this blog support OpenID.
There are really two different aspects to “supporting” OpenID. First, a blog, or any other website, can be an OpenID provider in that it can be the source URL used as an “OpenID URL” to login to a site that supports OpenID. Second, a blog can support logins using OpenID.
The first part is the easiest and I’ve done this now using the “OpenID Provider for WordPress MU” plugin. Extremely simple to use. Just download, unzip, and drop the one PHP script and a subdirectory into your “mu-plugins” directory. Ta da. It is activated by default and now you can login to other sites with the URL of your blog (and, naturally, having logged into your own blog with a valid username and password).
How does this work in practice? Well, over on my LiveJournal blog I replied to a comment using OpenID to login. Here’s how the result looked:
You can see the OpenID logo next to my name and then the URL for the main blog site. I chose to login with the OpenID of “http://blogs.voxeo.com/” but could have equally logged in with any of the actual blogs. (As far as WPMU is concerned, the portal page is one of the blogs… we’re just not using it in that way, i.e. there will never be posts to the “blog” that is our portal page.) What I am not showing in a screenshot is the intermediary step where I was presented with a page on my WPMU site where I had to authorize www.livejournal.com to obtain my identity information. I’m just showing the end result.
There are a couple of advantages to this. First, I can now have a work identity that is associated with my employer. Second, from a marketing point-of-view, I’m leaving the URL of my blog there in the comments for the post. Other readers can then click on the link to come back and visit this site. Third, as a user, I didn’t have to re-enter all this information to leave a comment. I just entered my OpenID URL, authorized the requesting site to use my identity and… ta da… there it was.
So that’s the “easy” part of turning your site into an OpenID provider. How about having this site support OpenID for comment logins? Welllll… that’s turning out to be a bit more challenging. In researching the matter, it looks like most folks are using the plugin “WP-OpenID“. I’ve downloaded and installed it, but because we do not have PHP 5 installed, I am experiencing the problems outlined in this support forum post: “Fatal Error / Parse error in Yaris.php when WP-OpenID activated“. I’ve modified the script as noted in the comments but am getting the “implode” error identified at the end by “ericabiz”. Once I either: upgrade to PHP5; wait for the authors to come out with a new rev; or find another solution; I will then write “Part 2″ about OpenID.
Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordpress mu, wpmu, openid, identity, plugins
Related posts:
- Supporting OpenID, part 2a: Setting up WPMU to accept OpenID logins
- Successful upgrade to WPMU 1.5.1 – with some lessons learned
- Enabling skype: and sip: URLs in WordPress MU 1.5.1
- Connecting WordPress MU to Twitter to auto-tweet new blog posts
- A key factor to a successful WPMU install? Make sure you have “php-mysql”!
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December 31st, 2007 at 11:25 am
[...] Behind The Blog A blog about a blog (site)… a view inside a WordPress MU installation « Supporting OpenID, part 1: Enabling the WPMU site to be used as an OpenID provider [...]
January 10th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
I’ve just ported WP-OpenID to WPMU, which means OpenID consumer support for logins and comments in everybody’s favourite blog-hosting solution, WordPress MU!
Oh, Dan York of LPI and e-smith fame? Awesome — hi!
January 11th, 2008 at 9:27 am
Jeff,
Very cool news! I’ll take a look at it and see about adding it here.
> Oh, Dan York of LPI and e-smith fame? Awesome — hi!
Yes, that’s me, although both seem an eon ago! (And actually, Oct 1, 2008, will mark the 10-year anniversary of the publication of my article that, for me, started the thread that lead to LPI.) Thanks for remembering those days.
Dan
January 11th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
[...] I noted in my last post about OpenID, the second and more difficult aspect of implementing OpenID is to enable this site to accept [...]
February 8th, 2008 at 10:44 am
[...] sites. OpenID has emerged as a leading contender in this space and as I noted on our Behind the Blog blog , I have now enabled this site as an OpenID provider so that those of us who write here can use [...]