It is now possible to log in with OpenID, automatically creating an account, and to associate an existing account with an OpenID for future logins.

Personally, I suggest MyOpenID (from JanRain) because it gives the option of using PhoneFactor’s phone-call-based 2-factor authentication.

So, I’m posting this partly to spread the word and partly to see if the existence of this post will be successfully tweeted complete with short URL.

(NOTE: while YOURLS itself supported the IDN seamlessly, its WordPress plugin seemed to choke silently when pointed at the unicode form of the IDN for the YOURLS API and needed the punycode version to make it work.)

Edit: actually, OpenID login now seems to be entirely broken.  Hmm…

June 6 – 7, 2009; venue to be announced by March 1.  More info and signup at http://wordcampchicago.com/.

Of course, it’s also annoying that while there’s a set_auth_cookie action hook, there’s no clear_auth_cookie, so my plugins had to override the clear_auth_cookie function wholesale rather than hooking into it as they do with set_auth_cookie.

If you have some twisted desire to make this unholy integration that I now seem to have working and would like some of my code, leave me a comment.

However, I just came across this in the bbPress forums:

As of July 2008, do NOT try to integrate WordPress 2.6 with bbPress 0.9 Use WP 2.5.1 – the reason for this is simple – WordPress has radically changed the way cookies are used. If you have already installed WP 2.6, don’t worry you have not broken anything, you’ll just need to downgrade and install 2.5 instead. 2.5.1 is perfectly stable and has no known security issues – 2.6 only adds a few new features to WP. There is an updated version of bbPress in the works to support the new cookie method but it might be awhile before it’s available in a mainstream release.

Now, ostensibly, WP and bbPress are coming from the same people/place/company/organization/whatever, so I think I should be able to expect the one to work with the other and to *not* have the left hand tell me to ignore what the right hand is doing.  This is almost enough (*almost*) to make me give up on trying to piece together a decent way to hook into the is_user_logged_in() thing for the non-WP part of the WP-based site I’m working on, since the bbPress part of the site won’t work even if I do fix the non-WP part of the site.

• what was the one and only login cookie in 2.5 is now limited to /wp-admin
• there’s a copy of that one that’s just limited to /wp-content/plugins, for backward compatibility with plugins
• there’s a new cookie that is at COOKIEPATH (which can be defined in your config file), that is checked by calling

  is_user_logged_in()

  (but perhaps this isn’t intended for secure authorization?)

So, it appears the way to go may be to change

auth_redirect()

to

Maybe more to follow on this when I’ve more thoroughly explored it.

The good news is that there’s an action hook, ‘set_auth_cookie’, that gets called whenever the cookies are set, so if the stuff for which you want to authenticate is on the same server but at a different path, you can create a plugin (or maybe use functions.php in your theme?) with something like the following:

The bad news is that if your WordPress install is at example.com/something and you want to use it to authenticate at portal.example.com, you can’t set a cookie for portal.example.com from a script on example.com, so your only choice would be to set a cookie with path / on .example.com (note the leading period), which completely breaks the security added by the separate cookies.

Hopefully, there’ll be a “part 3″ to this wherein I solve this last problem somehow, since that’s the setup I’m dealing with.

As a security measure in WP2.6, login cookies are now split into what seem to be at least three different cookies—two with paths like /wp-admin and /wp-content/plugins that are the full cookie that auth_redirect() checks against and one that’s different, with path / [paths relative to the blog root].  Near as I can tell, this immediately breaks any attempt to use auth_redirect() for authentication (e.g. this and this) outside the /wp-admin and /wp-content/plugins directories.  It is also not immediately clear to me how to authenticate against the whole-site cookie, if there’s any way to do that at all.

A temporary, but very bad fix would be to completely defeat the security by defining ADMIN_COOKIE_PATH to be the site root, rather than the path to /wp-admin.  I’m thinking that, from a quick skim of pluggable.php, there might be plugin action hooks to allow setting other cookies that would allow authentication on other paths…

I, however, wanted a little more.  I wanted to make sure that regular users who might be, well, “curious” about the inner workings of the site and who have some knowledge of wp-admin URL structure to be unable to get at anything but their profile page.  To this end, I added a little to the code:

This should redirect any non-admin user off of any /wp-admin* page to /wp-admin/profile.php. This might, however, cause issues for mid-level users (i.e. authors/editors/etc may not be able to access needed functions) and I haven’t tested it thoroughly and there might be a better way to do this. YMMV.  See also some comment-discussion on these changes at the plugin’s own page: me Patrick me.