OpenID

Just wanted to add that the Obama administration is reviewing OpenID for consideration within the .gov domain. Also David Eaves just wrote up a good appeal for OpenID in his post canadian governments: how to waste millions online ($30m and counting).

I first became aware of the movement behind the OpenID project back in 2004 at Advocacy Dev 1, organized by Aspiration Tech.  At the first Toronto Drupal Camp, I attended a great workshop by James Walker who was running through his OpenID module which has since been released as part of Drupal Core.  At that time I decided to set up an account with MyOpenID.com and have been using it ever since.  I've been so impressed with this approach to managing usernames & passwords that I've been enabling OpenID on client sites by default. 

Drupal tries to make it as easy as possible for users to start participating in an online community.  A lot of effort has been put into making the user registration process as simple as possible, however, given the nature of online spammers/hackers it is important to put in some controls to see that only the people you want to give access to are given rights on your site. 

So usually users will either see a text box on the sidebar, or click on a link which takes them to a registration page(full sized version of the one to the right).  This will allow you to enter in your preferred username and your email address.  You may also be asked to fill in profile information for yourself or your organization, but this is customized based on each website's needs.  After you it submit you will be sent an email with details on how to set up your account and you will see a message like this displayed on your screen:

Drupal 6.0 was just released yesterday and we're pretty excited about this as we've been watching the latest release evolve over the last year now.

We wanted to highlight just a few of the enhancements we've seen over 5.x:

I finally got around to setting up an OpenID module on a couple of sites and can see how it will save me time and make my systems more secure.

Like everyone else out there I'm sick of spam but like the idea of bringing user feedback to blog notes like this.

I was happy to have had chance to meet James Walker of Bryght and attend a couple of his workshops including his workshop on OpenID.