OpenID Bounty Status

Its been almost three months since we launched the OpenID Bounty Program and I wanted to give a status update.

First off, we knew going into this it would take awhile. We have never wanted to try and force an issue like this with an open source community; if they are interested great. But it still takes time to work through the community plumbing. Secondly, we’re actually still working on OpenID v2.0 but we’re getting close. As soon as its out, we’ll be looking for sites to implement it to claim the bounty prize money. Now, onward to the summary! :-)

MediaWiki

Evan Prodromou from Wikitravel has implemented an OpenID patch for MediaWiki and enabled it on his site. He had this done in early August so somehow I believe he was thinking about it long before the bounty program.

I’m really excited about this one because of the possible impact this could have on the wikisphere (yes, I just coined that word). If I have a common login that I can use across sites I can now track contributions across those sites very easily. I won’t say more, but some very smart people are working on some very cool stuff to make that happen.

Zope/Plone

Wichert Akkerman wrote in to share that he has successfully integrated OpenID with Zope and by extension also Plone. This is really exciting as Zope and Plone have big audiences in Europe, non-profit and government spaces. Thanks Wiggy!

phpBB

Just today the OpenID general discussion list got word that there is a phpBB patch coming along quite nicely. Dmitry Shechtman chimed in with some great screen shots of the prototype. Go Dmitry go!

Joomla

The Joomla folks showed some interest early on but I haven’t seen much activity since. One of the concerns raised in the Joomla forum posting was about branding. The comment was that the bounty was great but had unacceptable strings attached. The reason we put those guidelines there is to help from the user experience. We’re hoping that with the logo in the form and a common “theme” for how OpenID logins look like we can ease the transition for users and make it easier for them to use them. Now, these are in fact guidelines and the fact is not every site will want to have the OpenID logo. We’re hoping in the (not so distant) future people won’t even need it because its as ubiquitous as “http” in a URL … how many companies put the http:// in their print ads or commercials?

Drupal

I’ve had several discussions with Dries Buytaert who heads up the Drupal project about ways we could get OpenID into core. As it stands right now, Drupal tries to limit its dependence on outside libraries as much as possible. Today, support for OpenID comes from outside libraries that are rather large in comparison to other Drupal modules. This is completely understandable IMHO. That said, I’ve seen some activity for possible integration into Drupal 5.0 as well as older versions like Drupal 4.6. We’re of course eating our own dogfood and using the patch that we cooked up for the Drupal-powered JanRain corporate website. I’d love for OpenID to make it into core there … :-)

Others

We’ve had some other discussions with other projects but nothing concrete yet. I’d really love to get Wordpress enabled as this blog is powered by Wordpress … :-) I also think that Akismet is a great solution to help with comment spam with OpenID comments. Spammers are bound to start spinning up identity providers for the sake of comment spamming. Akismet would be a great way to up-end that.

Do you have an update about an application that you’re OpenID enabling? Feel free to let me know and I’ll get it up here!