The web has evolved into this amazing place filled with user-created content, blogs, wikis, photo sharing sites, and users can enter comments on just about all of them. But there’s a problem – commenting in Blogger, Flickr, and some random self-hosted WordPress blog requires you to create user accounts or type in tedious contact information separately in each one.
As a user, you probably want to spend your time commenting rather than remembering usernames and passwords. As a blogger, you no doubt want to make it as easy as possible for your readers to comment on your posts. What we need is some really powerful identity management system to make this all possible.
OpenID is an attempt at creating such a system that seems to be growing quickly. Instead of hundreds of usernames and passwords you have a simple URL that you control. I just added it to my WordPress blog to see if it’s helpful, and I’ll walk you through the steps you need to take to use it and allow your commenters to use it too.
How to use your blog as your OpenID
First off, you need to get an OpenID. Luckily, you probably already have one. Major sites like Blogger, LiveJournal, Flickr, and Yahoo are supporting OpenID so you can just go with what you have. You can also go with a specific provider. Which one should you use? It doesn’t really matter, since you can use your site’s URL as your OpenID and switch providers whenever you want.
Now that you have a URL, you need to use delegation to allow your site’s URL to stand in. In WordPress, this means opening up the header.php and adding a few lines to your <head> section. If you’re using Google’s Blogger (like me), the links would look something like this:
<link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://draft.blogger.com/openid-server.g” />
<link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”http://blogname.blogspot.com/” />
One side note – if you view the source of this page, you won’t see these lines. I’m using my root domain instead.
For more information, see this post by Sam Ruby.
How to use OpenID for comments in WordPress
This part is simple – like everything else you want to do with WordPress, there’s a plugin. Just download and install the WP-OpenID plugin and activate it.
You should notice a little OpenID icon in the fields for the comments below this post. Go a head and test it out.