OpenID in WordPress | Christian Spanring

Seems to be a good year for OpenID: some big players – AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Digg – are slowly approaching towards OpenID implementations and as I read on various blog posts, WordPress.com accounts can now be used as OpenIDs too.

I bet a native OpenID support can be expected soon in one of the upcoming WordPress releases. Meanwhile, and out of curiosity, I tried to turn my WordPress installation into an OpenID consumer. There are a few OpenID WordPress plugins around, but the best I found was the WordPress OpenID Plugin+ done by Will Norris. It’s based on WordPress Open ID Plugin, with some bugs fixed and an Unobtrusive Mode included.

Basically it works well and you should be able to login with your OpenID to this site now. But there are still a few issues left (maybe related to K2) which caused me some headache before I finally decided to go with the plugin:

Instead of a login screen I get only a blank screen. I can only login through the new OpenID input field placed in my header.
If I check the “Comment form” option I get a blank page when viewing single posts.
It obviously doesn’t play well with myopenid.com: I only get an “Error: OpenID assertion failed: Bad signature.” as answer after trying to register a myopenid.com-OpenID.

Anyway, it’s still very experimental and if you experience any problems with OpenID here please let me know.

Will Norris

Hmm… I’ve had a couple of other people reporting blank screens, but I can’t quite determine what the cause is. If you’re comfortable with subversion, would you mind trying the latest version that way and see if it addresses your issue? I’m using K2 on my site as well and haven’t seen these issues, so I’m really curious what is causing it. (also, what version of PHP are you running?)

I tried submitting this comment a few times and it continued to fail, and looking at the javascript errors, it appears to be caused by using K2′s live comments… I suspect it is incompatible with that, but I’ll test more later.
http://spanring.eu/ Christian

Will,

I upgraded to your current subversion trunk (r16 according to your site) and the blank screen still appear here. Just try to hit enter with an invalid OpenID in the header input field.

Not sure if it helps to track the problem down, but I uploaded my log file. On my local test installation everything works fine so far, without any blank screen problems…

K2 live comments should work (tested in IE7 and Firefox), in IE7 they through a few Javascript errors back, but the comments basically appear on the site.
http://nonsmokingarea.com/blog/2007/03/08/roundup-for-2007-03-08-openid-pagerank/ nonsmokingarea.com » Blog Archive » roundup for 2007-03-08 … OpenID, PageRank

[...] hosting your own WordPress-installation and fancying OpenID? Christian Spanring has tried the WordPress OpenID Plugin+ and shares his experience… [...]
http://blog.nona.net/2007/03/20/yet-another-openid-application-this-time-p2p-sip/ Yet another OpenID application – this time: P2P SIP at Alex Mayrhofer

[...] recent buzz around OpenID (see here, here, here, and probably here) could soon be pushed by a different kind of application – using OpenID [...]
http://www.glacialcommunications.com/news/?p=107 Glacial Communications » Blog Archive » Argh!

[...] off the OpenID plugin, it was causing single pages to not render correctly for non-logged-in users. I’m not the only one affected, so hopefully it will be fixed [...]
http://www.hetlab.tk/ Henk van de Kamer

I also got the blank screen and found a solution which I reported to Will Noris.

Of course I also got the blank page when viewing single posts if not logged in. Found a solution and reported it to the WordPress developers.

And guess what. I also have problems with some OpenID providers including http://www.myopenid.com. Yesterday I installed the phpbb-openid patch on my phpBB forum and that one has the same problem. My guess is therefor that it is in the PHP OpenID implementation. Haven’t found a solution, but my search let to this post .
http://www.hetlab.tk/ Henk van de Kamer

I found the solution and this works for the WordPress and phpBB implementation. Remove the record for http://www.myopenid.com/server from the xxx_openid_associations table and keep your fingers crossed. I read that the verification process gives bad data one out of three times. So keep removing if it doesn’t solve .
http://spanring.eu/ Christian

Thanks for the hint!!

I’ll try your solution as soon as I find some time for WordPress maintenance again!
http://belgourari.myopenid.com/ http://belgourari.myopenid.com/

OpenID login test
http://belgourari.myopenid.com/ http://belgourari.myopenid.com/

Seems it worked, but i got this message after validating my persona on OpenID :

Fatal error: Call to a member function postLevelPing() on a non-object in /home/.scrissie/cspanring/spanring.eu/blog/wp-content/plugins/myplugin.php on line 138
http://spanring.eu/ Christian

Thanks! I’ll have a look at that error!
http://jrm.cc/ Jeff

Openid test post
http://www.sootrip.com/ Venturi

Thanks, WP-OpenID updated to 2.1.8, i’ll go to download new ver…
http://www.farre.cat/blog Oriol

test
Dave

After reading around, I’m wondering if all the bugs have been worked out of OpenID. I don’t like to use, and recommend, things that still have problems.