What I learned from this discussion thread is that James Walker from Bryght has been working on another OpenID module that is intended for inclusion into Drupal 6 core distribution, without using JanRain’s library. There are apparently things that Drupal-heads don’t like about the JanRain’s library, licensing may be one of the issues.

So I pulled the DRUPAL-5 codebase from CVS and installed it, then installed the 5.x-1.x-dev snapshot tarball to test it out. First thing I noticed was that it doesn’t support XRI, and I really didn’t expect it to. Then, when I tried logging in with my dready.org identifier, it wouldn’t work because I delegated it to my myopenid.com account. So, it doesn’t support delegate either.

Then I spent a few hours getting rudimentary XRI support into it, and made it work with delegates. Few days later, I realized that this was only a snapshot and the module is in the Drupal contributions repository. So, I threw away my installation but kept the patch I made of the 5.x-1.x-dev snapshot and started anew. The result is a patch that works with the Drupal CVS trunk as of today.

The changes are:
1. When a first-time user is authenticated, a local account is created but no role was specified. Modified the module to add the ‘authenticated user’ role to the user.
2. XRI support. This is very rudimentary and does not support canonical ID yet, but shouldn’t be hard to implement.
3. Delegate support. In OpenID 2.0, the submitted identifier (URL) is passed to the OP as the openid.claimed_id parameter, while the delegate, if present, is sent as openid.identifier.
4. In the meantime, I noticed that the while the URL normalization conforms to the OpenID Authentication 2.0 implementor’s draft 11 specification, it treats http://dready.org and http://dready.org/ (with trailing slash) as different identifiers. Well, they should really be the same as RFC3986 says that for HTTP, an empty path is equivalent to “/”. This normalization rule was reflected in rev 294 of the spec.

Of course this is only a *very* rough patch (no pun intended). I have never hacked Drupal before, and haven’t read much of its coding styles though I tried to follow the conventions in the original code. I do hope that at least parts of it can be integrated into the module though.

My development environment is here: http://dready.org/drupal/. Feel free to try it out.

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Recently on the OpenID mailing list, many people are asking for a free i-name to play around with, research and develop software against. Global i-names cost USD20 per year but if you just want to evaluate the technology, you can get a community i-name for free. A community i-name is analogous to subdomains in the DNS world. A global i-name is something like @neustar or =wil. A community i-name has an extra subsegment tagged to the end e.g. @neustar*william.tan.

The i-name / XRI community has awakened to the challenge that we need to provide more support and documentation to the developer community, and our response is the dev.inames.net wiki.

In my little way, I have also created a site (http://xrid.net/) to allow developers to experiment with XRI resolution and Yadis by providing free community i-names under @xrid. The site allows you to have unlimited community i-names (you can even host your own like @xrid*wil*work), and link them to authorities (identities) in any way you like, and most importantly, edit XRDS documents that will be served by the auth.xrid.net authority resolution server.

So, if you’re a developer interested in experimenting with XRI technologies, get your free @xrid community i-name here.

(Note: you may be curious as to why @xrid. Well, XRID was an earlier incarnation of the XRD which is a recursive acronym for “XRI Descriptor”. Later, it was decided that we don’t want to tie the XRDS document format to just being used in XRI’s (e.g. Yadis uses XRDS documents.)

Did I mention that you can login with an OpenID too?

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Here’s a little success report about using JanRain‘s mpopenid module to protect certain restricted resources served by Apache. It works somewhat like your basic HTTP authentication, but instead of returning a 401 Authorization Required response causing the browser to prompt for username and password, it redirects you to the OpenID login page. Pretty neat eh?

--- mpopenid-1.2.0-pre5/mpopenid.py     Tue Nov 21 20:24:53 2006
+++ mpopenid-1.2.0-pre5-wil/mpopenid.py Sun Jan 14 16:12:16 2007
@@ -157,10 +157,17 @@
         url = s.strip()
         if not url:
             continue
-        parsed = urlparse.urlparse(url)
-        if not (parsed[0] and parsed[1]):
-            url = 'http://' + url
-        urls.append(urinorm(url))
+
+        if (url[0:6].lower() == "xri://"):
+            url = url[6:] # strip "xri://"
+
+        if (url[0] not in "=@!$+"): # doesn't look like an XRI
+            parsed = urlparse.urlparse(url)
+            if not (parsed[0] and parsed[1]):
+                url = 'http://' + url
+            url = urinorm(url)
+
+        urls.append(url)

     return urls