A few days ago in CS 419, a fellow student gave a presentation on how to setup Drupal 5, and showed some of its cooler features. After seeing it used in action, I knew that I wanted to move to it, for the sole reason of being able to incorporate my photo gallery into the same theme as my blog. And as you may be able to tell, here it is.
After getting most things setup(I am still not sure what I think about this theme), I felt pretty satisfied at the ease of use of Drupal. Other than possibly making a new theme, I didn't think that I would be pulling a late night(it is 6:24am right now) to work on a module for Drupal.
When I got into work yesterday, it seemed that all of the rage was a new site, http://jyte.com, from JanRain, Inc. This site allows you to build a reputation around your OpenID, making it easier for others to trust you and such. I have always liked the idea of OpenID, but hadn't actually gone to sign up for one yet for no apparent reason. With all the hype going on at work, I decided to jump on the bandwagon and get one from MyOpenID. Soon after signing up for this, I found one downfall that I wasn't sure that I liked so much. My new identity was http://jirwin.myopenid.com. To my great pleasure, I quickly learned that you can do something called domain delegation, which allows you to delegate your own domain to the OpenID server, thus making my new identity http://jirwin.net. Perfect! You can quickly find directions on how to do this here.
After messing around with my new OpenID, I came to realize how cool it actually is. Immediately I decided that I wanted allow users on my site with an OpenID to login to make comments and such. I shot over to the Drupal modules site, and found that the OpenID module hadn't been updated to the new module system in Drupal 5. Open Source FTW! I decided that it was important enough to me, that I would give a shot to porting the older module to the new system. What an adventure!
After a few hours of messing around with the different tutorials of how to write a Drupal module, I started to dive into the OpenID code. Apparently, the Drupal module system is amazing. It was decently simple to get things ported over to the new system, allowing me to finish everything in just under 5 hours. Woot!
So I offer to everyone that wants it: OpenID authentication for Drupal 5. I do hope that this will be added to the Drupal modules page soon enough.
Cheers!
