Behind The Blog

As I noted in my last post about OpenID, the second and more difficult aspect of implementing OpenID is to enable this site to accept OpenID logins for comments. In the comments to that post, Jeff Waugh replied today indicating that he had ported WP-OpenID over to WordPress MU.

Naturally I headed over to Jeff’s post as soon as I saw it. Since I had already downloaded WP-OpenID, I just needed to reference his bug report for the instructions on how to patch the plugin. Well, that and I needed to download the diff file (Note: from the dev.wp-plugins.org page, the “attachment” link brings you to an HTML-ized version of the diff file. To get the “raw” version, you need to select the “Original format” link at the bottom of the page (or follow my link here).)

However, although I followed the directions at the bottom of the page, it sadly didn’t work. In some correspondence with Jeff, I think the issue may lie in the fact that we use our own custom theme - and we may need to tweak that to support the OpenID plugin. However, in doing this, as you can see in the comments to his blog post, I ran into some other issues which seemed to expose problems with the existing WP-OpenID plugin. Basically, the WP-OpenID plugin upon which his work is based seemed to only accept OpenID URLs from direct OpenID providers (ex. claimid.com). When I entered my LiveJournal OpenID URL, that didn’t work because it actually redirects to another URL. Similarly, using “blogs.voxeo.com” as my OpenID URL didn’t work either, nor a number of other ones.

Not realizing that he was in Australia and it was approaching 4am, I wound up in a good chat session with Jeff trying to debug the issue. Eventually he needed to get some sleep and so we parked it for another time. So we move closer… I think I’ll wait a bit until Jeff gets a chance to dig a bit more into the OpenID cases that were failing. Once he’s got it thoroughly working, I’ll take a look at how to make it work with our theme. Interesting stuff (to me, anyway).

Technorati Tags:
identity, openid, wordpress, wordpress mu, wpmu, wp-openid

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.

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wordpress, wordpress mu, wpmu, openid, identity, plugins