TWiki 4.2.0 OpenIDUserContrib Consumer released.

I have just uploaded the OpenIDUserContrib for TWiki 4.2.0. It adds OpenID login and 1.1 Attribute functionalty to TWiki.

Currently, it disables Registration, and limits authentication to OpenID users.

It has the advantage over the OpenIDAuth apache module, that it automatically requests the User’s OpenId 1.1 attributes like Name, Email address directly from their OpenID identity.

While it trusts the user’s choice of ‘FullName’ registration attribute when displaying who made changes to topics, the TWiki topic source
actually stores the authenticating OpenID URI, thus their user details will be updated from the authentication server next time they log in.

Note that TWiki Topic based Groups are not yet implemented using this Mapper.

Future directions

  • add mixing of UserMappers to allow OpenID and ‘normal’ TWiki auth
  • turn TWiki into an OpenID identity server
  • add Safe Group definition system
  • add OpenId to TWiki’s registration process (would require openid auth first, then prefill registration details from any available attributes
    • This will require re-writing of TWiki’s inbuilt registration system
  • move the list of Known users and their mapping information from data/OpenIdUsers.txt to somewhere more scalable. (perhaps DBI)
    • combine the info TWiki uses persistently with the Session and other caching info OpenID11? uses

Net::OpenID11 (based on Net::JanRain::OpenID)

To make this work, I fixed the Perl bugs I found in Net::JanRain::OpenID, and renamed the resulting modules under Net::openID11 (as it is not OpenID2.0). I expect to upload these packages to CPAN some time soon.

If you want to take a look at the code – goto my Subversion repository

OpenID support for TWiki coming soon.

 

Sven Dowideit’s working on re-architecting TWiki’s authentication and session system to enable better support for external user management – for the upcoming TWiki 4.2.0 release in June, we should see OpenID support – at least for login, and registration – and later, TWiki will be able to be an OpenID providor too..

To make the June – July release, we’re expecting to re-release the Jan-Rain CPAN Consumer – to fix bugs, and make taint safe, and then depending on demand and support, to either maintain that library as the premier perl OpenID library, or when the SXIP library becomes a reality, to port to that.

I guess our thunder has been stolen by Sun’s rather big announcement – http://blogs.sun.com/superpat/entry/openid_at_sun … but it does make the work more important, as Sun use TWiki for things like http://wiki.java.net