Cristiano on Tech/Life

Want to use OpenID but not clear on what provider to use? Already have a Wordpress Blog up and running? Then why not use your Wordpress blog as your OpenID provider?

Since version 3.1 the WP-OpenID plugin comes with it’s own OpenID provider. Before 3.1 the plugin served as a consumer of OpenID for login and commenting on a Wordpress blog, but as of this version you can use your blog to login to other OpenID consumers. Just install the WP-OpenID plugin and make sure to enable the “Enable OpenID” option for your level of user (probably only administrator). This will allow you to log in to any OpenID enabled site with your blog url, or if you are not the blog owner with the author URL. In my case I can log in with http://blog.cristianobetta.com or with http://blog.cristianobetta.com/author/admin.

Delegation

I already had an OpenID with delegation setup on cristianobetta.com, with the OpenID being delegated to MyOpenID. I wanted to now delegate the OpenID instead to my blog but ran into some issues when searching for “wordpress openid delegation” on the internet. Most articles were on how to delegate from a blog to a different provider like MyOpenID, which was not what I wanted.

So here is the scoop. To delegate from any other url to your Wordpress blog, first install the XRDS-Simple plugin. This plugin will allow for XRDS discovery of all the relevant OpenID URLs on your blog. Then add the following meta tag into the header of the URL that needs to be delegated:

<meta http-equiv=”X-XRDS-Location” content=”http://blogdomain.tld/?xrds” />

or if you want to link to a specific user (admin in this case):

<meta http-equiv=”X-XRDS-Location” content=”http://blogdomain.tld/author/admin/?xrds” /> 

This line of code will tell any OpenID consumer to get the XRDS from your blog, and then process the OpenID transaction according to the details found in the XRDS response.