Hundreds of well-known Web sites like LiveJournal, America Online, and Yahoo! already use the shared identity service OpenID, with more sites adopting the technology each day. As OpenID continues to gain traction, associated projects are springing up to help implement it all across the Internet.
While WordPress.com supports OpenID, there is not yet a plugin for its non-hosted blogging platform. Developers of WordPress OpenID Plugin hope to change that. Designed for use with WordPress versions 2.0.3 through 2.1, this plugin lets visitors at WordPress blogs quickly login and leave comments via an OpenID identity.
Installation is dead easy and works just like any other WordPress plugin. Once decompressed into the archives, simply activate it within the administration plugin panel and configure your URL under Options -> OpenID. To see a live demonstration, including the login panel visitors see, check out the project’s main Web site.
phpBB is a hugely popular communication software package (and winner of our 2007 Community Choice award) that’s used to build flat-style discussion forums. Since its use is so widespread, naturally the OpenID Auth for phpBB project has attracted a lot of attention since registering with SourceForge.net in 2006. OpenAuth for phpBB works with versions 2 and 3, and has a robust community of users behind it.
Though the point of OpenID is to have a single login identity across multiple Web sites, the developers of AROUNDMe have taken the idea a step further to create an entire social software collection centered around the OpenID framework. The suite of apps features three separate products: an OpenID identity, an AROUNDMe identity server for creating multiple identities for others, and a collaboration server for creating Web-based collaborative social spaces.
According to the Web site, AROUNDMe makes it possible to “decentralize” your social network and make it “one that you own and that you can take from place to place,” as well as a “digital identity” via OpenID.
So when will SoureForge.net implement OpenID? Lots of people have been asking and our own Luke Crouch answered that very question in our discussion forums just a couple days ago.
UPDATE: Actually, I was mistaken about the WordPress plugin. WordPress already has an official plugin found here. The project I mention above, while clearly worthwhile, hasn’t been updated in quite sometime. I apologize for the error.