Today I am happy to announce the availability of the first Movable Type plugin to make use of Movable Type 4.2's built in support for OpenID 2.0. The Yahoo! OpenID plugin for Movable Type allows users to provide Yahoo! users with a specially crafted login experience specific to them:
Movable Type's ability to allow developers to build these customized logins, such as the one for AOL/AIM and WordPress, helps to make OpenID accessible to everyone - especially those who don't understand that a URL can be used to login to a web site.
Movable Type and Drupal are the only blogging platforms that have support for OpenID 2.0 built into its core that I know of.
Works great for Flickr OpenIDs and MyBlogLog OpenIDs as well!
When I setup my MT4 blog, I only enabled the OpenID login method. I don't really like the idea of giving preferential treatment to a select few sites. It seems contrary to the principle of OpenID.
I am reconsidering though because no one has ever logged on my blog to comment. Then again, I only have received 26 comments total so it may not be a good sample.
Hmm. I just had a thought. People like typing their URL into the "anonymous" comment form. What if we used that to auto-login? Or offer to "authenticate" their comment?
One thing lacking in the implementation of this and the other OpenID plugins is that when you log in, you are the thing you logged in as. Meaning, if I use the Yahoo! account, I show up as being a nonsense string of characters, rather than my usual nom de plume. I think there needs to be, by default, an extra name field for all these other plugins.