Plaxo » A Recipe for OpenID-Enabling Your Site

Plaxo » A Recipe for OpenID-Enabling Your Site: "A Recipe for OpenID-Enabling Your Site

Prepared by Joseph Smarr at Plaxo on July 18, 2007.

This is a step-by-step tutorial guide for implementing OpenID consumer-side support with a web site that already has users with accounts. It will explain how to easily let new users sign up for an account on your site using their OpenID URL and how to let existing users attach their OpenID(s) so they can sign in using them.

I developed this guide by talking to fellow OpenID developers at the Internet Identity Workshop and elsewhere, and by implementing OpenID support for Plaxo using these instructions. I've also posted detailed screenshots of Plaxo's implementation for reference. I've intended for this guide to be clear and complete and to follow best-practices, but if you have any questions or feedback, please let me know at joseph@plaxo.com or by posting a comment on Plaxo's blog.

This guide may look a bit long, but my hope is you can just follow it straight through without thinking much, and you'll be completely done by the time you reach the end! :)
Overview

I'm assuming your web site currently has:

* A user database with rows for each user
o Each user has a unique internal user ID
o Users currently sign in using a username/e-mail and password
*"