More
OpenID WikiMaking a startup hospitable "or" How to use OpenID on your site
I'm sure you've seen the abbreviation OpenID. Quite possibly you have an opinion that this is such a fashionable thing, the support of which is increasingly claimed by various popular projects. By and large, this is the case, but why is this technology really needed? Suppose you are an avid blogger, you have an account at wordpress.com, but it happened that you read the message in someone else's diary and there was an irresistible desire to leave a comment to the author. But here's the ill luck - someone else's diary was on livejournal.com. Really just to leave a comment you will have to register on the "enemy" blog hosting? And here and not. In the form of authorization livejournal.com there is an unobtrusive link "Login by OpenID". You follow this link, enter your ID with wordpress (say, ivan.wordpress.com). Opens the "native" wordpress.com and slyly squinting at you "Do you want to pass your identity to this" soup-admirers' Site "?". You reluctantly press "Yes; Just this time ", then you find yourself on that ill-fated page livejournal.com with the comment form. But (!) This time you are authorized to LiveJournal under your "Vordpresos" account. Finally, you can leave a comment. It will not be long before the OpenID will hear another "Wow!", But already from the user livejornal.com, hurrying to return you the answer.OpenID is a decentralized single registration system. This is somewhat wider than stated on wordpress.com: "OpenID is an open standard that allows you to log in to other people's sites using your A WordPress.com account ":) If you are registered with a project that is, among other things, an OpenID provider, you can log in to this single account on any site that supports OpenID. It sounds wonderful, the idea is fantastic, but there is a reasonable question: "Are there many projects supporting OpenID or is it an unpredictable future?" In principle, not a little. Already stated about 1200 sites that support OpenID and every day comes 10-15 new. Among these sites are many popular projects: Livejournal.com, Vox.com. Wikitravel.org, Ma. Gnolia.com, Movabletype, Iconbuffet.com, Basecamphq.com. There are integration modules for such popular software, such as Wordpress, Joomla!, Plone, Drupal. MediaWiki, CakePHP, Symfony Framework. Microsoft and AOL declared support for the technology. OpenID support will be implemented in Firefox 3.0.
But how to use OpenID on your site? If you are building a project on the CakePHP framework or Symfony, you just need to configure the plugins CakePHP OpenID component and sfOpenIDPlugin respectively. If you do not use the framework, but just want to attract users to the registration for your project (maybe a startup), the easiest way is to use the small library Simple OpenID PHP Class. In the package, available for download in addition to the library, there is an example script where in an accessible form is shown how to authorize the user through the OpenID protocol. The only trouble you can face is this library uses the functions of the PHP Libcurl extension library. Those. If your PHP is compiled with the option --with-curl - everything is fine. Otherwise, this library is unlikely to work. The author of this solution was forced to use specific functions where it would be possible to use more traditional methods of HTTP-request due to the fact that many OpenID providers require an SSL connection.
If you are more serious and are going to implement a full-fledged management of user accounts in your project, relying on popular solutions such as OpenID, LID (Light-Weight Identity) and Yadis, use the NetMesh InfoGrid LID PHP. It is also worthwhile to draw ATTENTION on the PHP OpenID library. However, in this case, you will need a console PEAR-installer.
In conclusion, I must say that there is a number of criticisms of OpenID regarding vulnerability in security. In my opinion, also the need to read a complete HTML page for the subsequent analysis of microformat tags is an extremely inefficient approach (the OpenID 2.0 specification requires an XRDS document or a Yadis document). I would like to use REST, but this There are some doubts about the account. Nevertheless, OpenID is just the case when a great idea still works. So, personally, I will be glad if I can use my OpenID account on the new original promising project that you collected.
