#wordpress

WordPress Authentication Framework: Keyring

Keyring: An authentication framework for your plugins

Quite a while ago (like, in at least 2009), I started thinking about regaining control of all the content I was producing online. I was posting photos to Flickr, saving bookmarks to Delicious. I started Tweeting. I was checking in. All fun and games, and all of those services offer great tools for interacting with them (let’s face it, tools that are much better than WordPress’, because they are focussed on one thing). So I figured, why not write importers for these services and pull my content back over to my WordPress. And keep doing it periodically, so that I could keep using those tools. I want WordPress to be my “home on the web”, my digital hub, but I want to use these neat tools with their fancy apps and what-have-you.

Very quickly, I realized that if I was going to do anything useful on most web services, I’d need to be able to authenticate with them. No biggie, right? I know my username and password… Oh. Right. OAuth. Turns out that most web services use OAuth (or something similar) to authenticate, and it turns out that that’s actually a bit of a bear to implement, when all you want to do is write a simple little Twitter importer. And then again for a Foursquare importer. And a Flickr importer.

What I needed was a shared, generic authentication framework that would do all the heavy lifting for me. I would tell it I wanted a connection to specific service, and if it didn’t have one, it’d walk the user through the process of getting one. It’d give me a standardized format of authentication credentials and abstract out all the complexity of making authenticated requests against those services. Then it would make me a coffee*. What I needed, was Keyring.
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A Random Idea Around Small-Group Collaboration

I use CloudApp a lot, and recently saw mention of Dropmark. That got me to thinking of a relatively simple, WordPress-powered application for small-group-collaboration which I thought I’d throw out here in case anyone wanted to build it.

  • A WordPress installation, with a group of people who all have accounts
  • A small Mac/Windows app that lived on your desktop/menu-bar/somewhere easy to get at. Let’s call it… Guppy.
  • All users download a copy of Guppy and configure it to point to the same WordPress install.
  • Guppy now sits on their computer, waiting for them to interact with it.
  • When they drop files on this copy of Guppy, it does some magic
    • Images will be uploaded and inserted into a Post, or set as a gallery (if there’s more than one),
    • Text files will be uploaded and rendered as pre-formatted text,
    • Other will be uploaded and attached to a Post,
  • Double-clicking/clicking Guppy would open a small window where they could type in some text (and perhaps also drop files into that window and have them appear as “objects” within their text)
  • Right-clicking Guppy would allow you to change options, jump to the configured website (like you didn’t already have it open in a browser tab!), create a new instance of Guppy, maybe some other stuff.
  • All of this content is published as Posts on the connected WordPress install, and is automatically formatted beautifully (perhaps via an optional theme that’s geared heavily towards collaboration?). Comments are enabled, so you can discuss things on that site, right there while you’re looking at it.

In essence this is just a streamlined, simplified, beautiful WordPress client. There is nothing stopping someone from creating this today. There you go internet, 1 more free idea.