While writing Whitelisting With OpenID and XFN, I started thinking about what kind of work would have to go into implementing these ideas in Wordpress. One of the roadblocks I ran into was that in Wordpress (and Drupal, probably, and most other similar systems) links only support a single URI (not surprisingly). In order to support OpenID whitelisting, we need a unique identifying URI for an XFN contact - which may or may not be the same as the blog/site URI that you’d want to list in a blogroll.
I thought about trying to hack the support in myself, but after browsing through the 4 or 5 different files that would require patching, as well as adding database support, I decided I haven’t the experience with Wordpress nor the time to do it right. But I’d like to discuss this with someone who has the Wordpress expertise to give this a shot. Would be nice if it were a plugin, so we don’t have to hack the core code.
Any takers?
My plan with wp-openid has always been that it would be outside the plugin itself. Because mapping the relationship between IDs is so intensive (my personal graph has 22 IDs), it doesn't make sense for each individual WP installation do be expected to do that work. I imagined that the plugin would talk to one or more third-party services to verify if they should accept the ID... that could be something as simple as botbouncer, or it could take all of the individuals other published XFN relationships into account. You could configure it to "Accept comments from IDs that are within 4 degrees of separation from me, limited to friends and family". I bought openidtrust.org with the idea of building exactly such a service, just haven't had the time... Chris Messina has already given me a list of additional things he would like to see written on top of wp-openid. :)
Hmm, will's suggestion makes sense - a more generalised personal graph plugin might be a good idea. btw, some more resources on FOAF+OpenID: http://esw.w3.org/topic/FoafOpenid
Nice work Steve. You can totally do it! You're a l337 h3x0r!11 >:-|
testing...