Allowing users to sign in with their OpenID accounts to comment

Oct 23, 2009 08:58 GMT  ·  By
The Google Friend Connect for WordPress allows users to sign in with their OpenID accounts to comment
   The Google Friend Connect for WordPress allows users to sign in with their OpenID accounts to comment

Google hasn't been so successful on the social front as in other areas that can be tackled with computational power. Still, it's not giving up and it is expanding the functionality of the Google Friend Connect social widget with support for WordPress blogs. The new plugin allows users to authenticate using OpenID accounts and comment on the blog without having to set up a new account.

The Google Friend Connect plugin for WordPress “allows your visitors to authenticate using any OpenID account such as Google, Yahoo, or AIM and then comment on your posts with no need to complete a registration form,” Mauro Gonzalez of Globant wrote in a guest post on Google's Social Web Blog. “When a visitor authenticates as described above, a WordPress account is automatically created for them. You can later add or remove permissions for the visitor from the WordPress site administration pages.”

The idea behind Friend Connect is to have a unified presence across any number of blogs and sites hosted by various services. This eliminates the need to register and manage multiple, separated accounts on different sites. It can be seen as a Facebook Connect competitor of sorts, though the two tools have different target audiences and goals. The main draw of Friend Connect is the ability to leave a comment that is connected to a real account, as opposed to just leaving an anonymous one, without having to create a new one.

But Friend Connect can do more than that. For example, the new WordPress plugin can replace the default WordPress commenting system entirely with the Google Friend Connect comments gadget. If one decides to take this route, there is no need to create another WordPress account for every user. The gadget will handle the comments section rendering, but it also has a moderation system. Even without the comments gadget, the user's avatar picture and a link to their profile will be available in the regular comments.

There are a bunch more gadgets available – Social Bar, Members, Recommendations, and Global Conversation gadgets – and the best part is that all of them can be customized from inside the WordPress admin panel along with other options. Installing the plugin is as easy as any other WordPress plugin and requires you to sign up your site with Friend Connect and then download and install it. Detailed instructions can be found here.