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WordPress OpenID 2.0 (coming soon?)

by Will Norris

I’m somewhat hesitant to pre-announce some of this, but maybe giving myself some kind of deadline is the only way to actually get it done. In recent weeks I’ve spent some time on my wordpress openid plugin, which has gotten some attention the last several months. A number of people have had trouble with WordPress 2.2.x and there were a number of outstanding issues I’d been wanting to address, so I finally forced myself to devote some time to it. I’ve certainly not finished everything yet, but it’s worth noting that there’s at least one brave soul (and a quite notable one at that) running it in production. There are a few notes to be aware of regarding this not-yet-released version 2.0 of the plugin…

  • version 2.0 will require WordPress 2.2 or greater. This is not likely to change, as the previous version continues to work in earlier versions of WordPress.
  • version 2.0 currently requires PHP5. This will change before the final release, with the minimum PHP version moving to either 4.3 or 4.4.
  • jQuery is used for all comment form manipulation… this means that this particular feature requires javascript, but should work out of the box on tons more themes.
  • the latest version is available in the subversion repository ’trunk’. I’d love to get some feedback (keeping the above limitations in mind), but please to proceed with caution. Detailed feedback is needed and actual patches are certainly appreciated (though not required). My project page for the plugin had fallen horribly out of date, but I’ve updated the URLs to point to the current subversion repository and such.
  • I’d like to have the plugin released around the same time as OpenID 2.0 being finalized (supposedly the first of October). Given how long it’s taken me to get back at it thus far, this seems realistic.

I’ll also note that I’ve made a project page for my MicroID plugin. The plugin has actually been around for quite some time, but somehow I missed making a page for it. This plugin builds on some ideas in existing MicroID plugins, but goes a bit further to support a number of additional features.

Comments and responses

Have you written a response to this? Let me know the URL:

Scott Kveton

I prefer “foolhardy” over “brave” … :-)

Great work Will … the new plugin is a dream and works well with the two themes I’ve tested it with. Thanks so much!

Martin-Louis Bright

Hi!

Thanks for working on this. I had a few problems installing the latest wpopenid from trunk…

First, the plugin is expecting the file Auth/OpenID/SReg.php to be Sreg.php (lower case r). Then wordpress seems to be happy with the plugin.

However, I then receive a database error after I successfully login to my openid provider and get redirected back to my blog.

WordPress database error: [Unknown column ‘server_url’ in ‘field list’] REPLACE INTO wp_openid_settings (blah blah blah)

There is apparently no server_url field in the wp_openid_settings table. I’m using MySQL 4.1

Michael Gracie

Will,

Curious if you figured out that “options” replication issue we discussed?

I’ll be glad to restart testing over here any time you like - just give the go ahead for “the one with less guts than Kveton.” :-)

Alexandre Passant

Hi,

Except a few includes that do not work with WP2.3 (see WP bugtracker) it seems to work fine with latest WP version, great !

I updated it so that it can retrieve a FOAF profile for any user registering a WP weblog. FOAF is a ‘machine-readable’ format (in the Semantic Web way) that defines who you are, you knows, your interests … Thus, people register with their openID URL, and using the FOAF profile you can know more about them, without they need to complete anything on your blog. More to come soon, but you can already check it there: http://apassant.net/blog/2007/09/23/retrieving-foaf-profile-from-openid/

Cheers

Curt Pederson

Will,

I’ve been working with the previous version and never really got it working right, so I just checked out the latest code from SVN and replaced the old version with the latest code. When I tried logging in, it gave me the following error:

WordPress database error: [Unknown column ‘server_url’ in ‘field list’] REPLACE INTO wp_openid_settings (server_url, timestamp, salt) VALUES (blah, blah, blah)

I was going to try and add the column myself, but I figured I’d let you know about it and just wait for the gold version.