[wp-hackers] GSoC 2009 Ideas: Open ID integration with Wordpress & Template Versioning

Otto otto at ottodestruct.com
Tue Mar 31 20:07:45 GMT 2009


True. I think this is because it generally doesn't make any sense to
be an OpenID consumer, for a lot of cases. All it really adds is
complications.

I mean, what does being a consumer get you, as a programmer of a
webapp? Not much. You still have to store your own user data for that
user. If you didn't have any user data to store, then why bother
having them authenticate at all? Whereas being a provider gets you
quite a lot. If you've already got a user authentication system, then
becoming a provider is relatively straightforward. And now you know
what other services your users are using, if you care to know that
info (good stuff for marketing purposes).

The whole OpenID standard just strikes me as a solution in search of a
problem. Not the whole single-sign-on idea, that is still a problem.
But the need to tie your identity to a specific provider is still
there. You don't use usernames and passwords anymore, you need to use
a URL, which is a new and complex idea for a lot of folks. Etc, etc...

-Otto



On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 12:12 PM, Eric Marden <wp at xentek.net> wrote:
> On Mar 31, 2009, at 3:03 AM, scribu wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 9:53 PM, Eric Marden <wp at xentek.net> wrote:
>>
>>> WordPress.com is already an OpenID provider, and has been for quite
>>>>
>>>> some time: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2007/03/06/openid/
>>>>
>>>
>>> And yet you still can't login to WP.com with OpenID...
>>
>>
>> Of course not: You can't use OpenID to login to the OpenID provider
>> itself.
>
> I don't use the OpenID provided by wordpress.com (since I only use it for
> Akismet/Stats API Keys anyway and don't have a blog URL with the service).
> But this goes back to my point that there are a ton of providers but rarely
> any consumers.
>
>
> - Eric Marden
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