Simon Willison’s Weblog

A Recipe for OpenID-Enabling Your Site. Detailed guide to setting your site up as an OpenID consumer from Plaxo, who just launched their OpenID implementation. It basically describes the design I’m using for the next release of django-openid.

Posted 18th July 2007 at 7:50 am

Tagged django, djangoopenid, openid, plaxo, tutorial

3 comments

Why have a many-to-one mapping? I suspect few support multiple emails per user at the moment and wouldn't have thought that multiple OpenIDs would be that useful.

Adding a single new column in your user table would be much simpler.

Charles Darke - 18th July 2007 08:47 - #
Here are a few reasons:
- People can still sign in if one of their providers is down
- People can un-associate an OpenID without locking themselves out
- You can take advantage of site-specific services around each of their OpenIDs
Simon Willison - 18th July 2007 10:00 - #
More importantly though, it means you can start to build up a much more detailed picture of who your user actually is. Supporting multiple OpenIDs lets them "prove" to you a whole bunch of statements - "this is my LiveJournal, this is my Twitter account, this is where I keep my bookmarks". This gives you loads of scope for building interesting new features further down the line.

Simon Willison - 18th July 2007 10:02 - #