Alden Bates' Weblog

Last week Blogger announced they were adding OpenID to their commenting system, so I thought I'd try my hand at installing the OpenID server which comes with MT4.

In the "extras" directory of the MT4 install zip, there's openid-server-1.1.zip. Looking at the contents of that zip, 96% of the files appear to be useless Subversion cruft. WTF? Having installed it, I tried to use it to comment on the Blogger In Draft post, and discovered that Blogger was giving me the somewhat cryptic name of "www". Now, there are other comments from users apparently using OpenID on that entry who have names displayed which don't appear to be derived from their URL. This appears to be an extension of OpenID, which isn't supported in the MT server or, more specifically, the Net::OpenID::Server perl module. The good news is that this module is still under development (the last release was in September) so it's possible that the extensiony stuff will be implemented in it.

While the MT version of the OpenID server plugin hasn't been updated since August 2005, there's a newer version of the plugin on MT-Hacks. This also uses the Net::OpenID::Server module which, though it's a newer version, still doesn't seem to support the extension. After taking a good look myself, it's beyond me how to extend the perl module to use aforementioned extensions, so instead I'm going to take a look at implementing a FOAF file, as suggested on the MT-hacks site...