OpenID Authentication
 

I've finished a first draft of an add-on to support OpenID Authentication. This requires no code changes and only one template change. The caveat however, is that it does require two third party libraries to handle the OpenID and Yadis protocols. I've only tested it on 3.5.4, but I'm pretty sure it should work in 3.6 (RC1) as well.

Right now, this add-on allows existing users to populate a custom profile field with their OpenID URL, and then use that for subsequent logins. This does NOT allow new users to register with their OpenID... they will still need to create an initial password and such as normal. I'd like to change that in a future release.

If you're not familiar with OpenID, check out http://openid.net/

So from what I read they still need to create a password on your site :surprised:
but it shares the userID (url) across all sites...?

Just trying to lay out the benefits of using this

right now, yes you would still need to setup a password. Once the account is created, you can setup your OpenID and use that for subsequent logins instead of the username/password pair. Ultimately, it needs to have user registration using only OpenID to be truly useful, but this is the first half of it.

This looks promising. I will wait for the next half :)

Any verification of 3.6.0 compatibility? Any word on the second-half rollout?

I'm just in the process of pulling my three boards up to 3.6.0 and I'm probably going to put this in at this point, unless you tell me that a new release is around the corner.

Any ideas of how I can get it to work in the opposite way? I.e. for every user registered on the forum provide openid verification if they want to use logins from my forum on other openid enabled sites?

Denis

Well, the first step would be to look at the OpenID PHP Library at openidenabled.com. Technically, it should certainly be possible, but you may run into a few problems. The first that comes to mind, is what would a user's URL be? The most obvious would be the URL for the member page, but that is of the form "http://site.com/board/member.php?u=12345"... certainly not something all that easy to remember. Moreover, I would seriously think about whether you *should* be running an OpenID server, from a philosophical perspective. For the particular community that I run (and I would imagine this would be the case for most communities), it makes far more sense for my users to bring their own OpenID (from their LiveJournal, perhaps) and I just consume them. If they don't have an existing ID, I will likely point them to somewhere like myopenid.com.

I installed this on 3.6.5. There were a couple of glitches:

• the forum url and home url ($vbulletin->options['homeurl']) have to be the same for the proper redirect URL to be constructed for the Identity Provider
• the profilefield table doesn't have a title field, so the code which tries to discover the profilefieldid of the OpenID field in the user profile doesn't work - I worked around that by hardcoding the profilefieldid (there must be a way to discover that!)

Now works great with iNames!

- Mark

Yeah, I probably need to revisit a lot of things about this plugin. Recently, I've been focusing on a Wordpress plugin to enable OpenID, but I'll try and get back on this on and finish it up. There is also a good plugin for phpBB at http://openid.phpbb.cc/ which I may look at using for some inspiration.

I've also installed your WordPress OpenID plugin :-) - thanks muchly!

A next step for the vBulletin plugin would I think be to allow registering with an OpenID, and have that URL or iName be used as the vBulletin username.