When I started digging in to OpenID a couple years ago, it was only because someone in the company’s marketing department thought it sounded cool and therefore we needed it on our Web site.
At that time, I’d only ever set up a personal OpenID endpoint so I started looking around on what it would take to become an OpenID consumer in order to authenticate our users. After trying various things, I settled on the Simple OpenID class that I found on PHPClasses.org. The only problem was that it wasn’t OpenID 2.0 compliant, and therefore wouldn’t work with Yahoo. So I worked my way through the OpenID specifications and got it functioning the way I wanted, even releasing the new code as Dope OpenID. Still, we never saw more than a few hundred people taking advantage of OpenID on our site (out of a million or so active users).
Since then, all I can say is that OpenID has become significantly less exciting. I haven’t updated the code in a long while, though someone will occasionally post a modification in the comments. I actually put the source up on GitHub hoping the modifications would get merged in that way.
Anyway, all that to say for the last several months I’ve been intending to announce that I’m no longer going to be doing any development on Dope OpenID. Today’s announcement of the PHPClasses Zeitgeist was the kick in the pants I needed. While OpenID was the top search on PHPClasses in 2007, it didn’t even make the list in 2008 or 2009. In my opinion, the average user still has no idea what OpenID is and they’re just more trusting of things that sound familiar to them, like Facebook Connect.
So, to sum up, I’m no longer doing any development on Dope OpenID. I will leave the project page up for a while and continue to allow comments, but I’d much rather let someone else take over the project if they have an interest in it. Or else just fork it on GitHub.
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That is so sad.. This class is pretty good and it works very well ….
I could not get the .net version working on my site, so I was trying dope openid php class, because it had a working demo on the web. I needed it use from ASP pages, so Once I got the php classes working, I made some ASP wrapper web pages calling dope openid php pages… and it all works fine now!!
Start-WebPage -> LoginButton -> ASP (set session vars) -> PHP-login -> (open-id provider) -> ASP (invokes – login.php locally to verify with open-id provider) -> back to Start-WebPage
Thanks. I appreciate the feedback. Unfortunately, it’s just difficult to continue working on something when my heart is no longer in it.