The word just went out today that the WordPress.com blog hosting service now supports OpenID, both as a server and a consumer. Supporting it as a server means that if you have a blog on WordPress.com, you can use your blog URL as an OpenID. Supporting it as a consumer means that you can use any OpenID to login to your WordPress.com account (once you’ve associated your OpenIDs with your regular login). This means that there are now at least 740,000 more OpenIDs in the wild!
I don’t know if there are plans to fold this functionality into the main WordPress core, but I’d guess not. But it would be nice to see it as an “official” plugin.
(via Factory City)
Update: as pointed out, I was mistaken about the consumer part. That’s a bummer, but the creation of nearly three-quarters of a million new OpenIDs is still pretty nifty.
Yay! It works.
Johathan: Oops, you’re right — hasty edit on my part. Corrected
factoryjoe: Agreed. Adding the consumer side of things to WordPress.com wouldn’t be too hard, as the verselogic plugin shows.
Let’s just say that my original post was optimistic about what I *hope* to see WordPress happen… this is still a great first step!
Wouldn’t that be “nearly three quarters of a million new OpenIDs”? Anyway. It’s a bunch.
It’s on the wishlist, in multiple instances:
http://wordpress.org/extend/ideas/topic.php?id=40
http://wordpress.org/extend/ideas/topic.php?id=199
http://wordpress.org/extend/ideas/topic.php?id=490
http://wordpress.org/extend/ideas/topic.php?id=500
As Chris Messina has updated his post to reflect, he was mistaken about the consumer part. It happens.
See http://wordpress.com/blog/2007/03/06/openid/ for the supporting it as a server announcement.