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.

Fortunately I found this post in German which Google kindly translated for me, and it solved my problems.

Since the translation screws up some of the code, I thought I would post the steps here in English in case anyone finds it useful.

Step 1: LAMP

If you don’t already have PHP 5 and Apache2 set up, this will get you started. Open up a terminal and type:
[bash]sudo tasksel install lamp-server[/bash]

Guiding you through setting up PHP and Apache is beyond the scope of this guide, so if you get stuck, check the multitude of guides available on Google.

Step 2: Upgrade LAMP

With PHP 5 and Apache installed, the next step is to install the developer versions.

• php5-dev (otherwise you’ll get an error about “phpize”)
• apache2-threaded-dev (or else you’ll get an “apxs” error)

[bash] sudo apt-get install php5-dev apache2-threaded-dev [/bash]

Step 3: Getting build tools

We’re going to be building from source. If you’ve never done that before it’s pretty easy, but first you’ll need some extra tools.
[bash] sudo apt-get install build-essential [/bash]

Step 4: PEAR and memcached

You’re also going to need PEAR and the memcached binary.
[bash] sudo apt-get install php-pear memcached [/bash]

Step 5: Building libmemcached

You’ll need to get the latest source package from here. You may have to try different versions until you get it working. In 9.04, libmemcached-0.33 worked. For 9.10, it was libmemcached-0.37. As of Ubuntu 10.04′s launch, the latest version was libmemcached-0.40, which appears to install correctly but under actual usage conditions the Memcached::add() method failed to write every time, returning error code 5. I recommend sticking with libmemcached-0.37 for now if you’re running Ubuntu 10.04.

Download the appropriate version with your preferred method, or type:
[bash] wget http://download.tangent.org/libmemcached-0.37.tar.gz [/bash]

Extract the files with your preferred method, or type:
[bash] tar -xzf libmemcached-0.37.tar.gz [/bash]

Move into the extracted directory:
[bash] cd libmemcached-0.37/ [/bash]

Configure the package.
[bash] ./configure [/bash]

Make.
[bash] make [/bash]

Make install. Note this probably will require sudo rights.
[bash] sudo make install [/bash]

Step 6: PECL

Finally, you can install the memcached extension through PECL. [Thanks to Andy Lav for pointing out this very important missing step in the comments.]
[bash] sudo pecl install memcached [/bash]

When this process completed, you should see something like this:
[bash]
Build process completed successfully
Installing ‘/usr/lib/php5/20060613+lfs/memcached.so’
install ok: channel://pecl.php.net/memcached-1.0.0
Extension memcached enabled in php.ini
[/bash]

If you see this, you should be ready to go.

You might instead get a message that says: You should add “extension = memcached.so” to php.ini. If that’s the case, open the file with the following and paste extension = memcached.so at the top:
[bash] gksudo gedit /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini [/bash]

After you save and close the file, restart Apache.
[bash] sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart [/bash]