A Capital Region Drupal meetup (the first of its kind I believe) is scheduled for March 6th and I hope to be able to talk about authentication and identity. Just a couple of years ago the issue of authentication and identity on Drupal sites was limited to the functions of the Drupal login system. I remember that the first module I ever utilized to improve the login process was LoginToboggan. LoginToboggan adds such nifty features as logging in with name or email address, placing a login form on pages not accessible to anonymous users and much more. It's a great module and I still use it today. Since then we've also seen a few social networks like Twitter and Facebook increase greatly in popularity. So while millions of people create accounts on those services they may not necessarily want to create an account (and have to remember another password) on your Drupal powered site.
Lucky for us Drupal site builders that the big social networking players realized that in order to get even bigger they would need to reach out to other sites. They have done so via APIs such as Facebook Connect, the Twitter API and Google Friend Connect. All three of these services allow someone to login to a website with their credentials from each of these services. So this allows people to log in to your Drupal site with their identity from Facebook, Google, or Twitter. Pretty cool, eh? All you need are the modules that make the connection between your site and these services.
Modules do exist for each of the three services mentioned above. Facebook Connect, Twitter, and Google Friend Connect all allow you to authenticate users to your site. They require varying degrees of technical expertise to set up and the exact functionality varies too. The good part is that they all seem to excel at verifying the identity of an anonymous visitor to your site, at least temporarily. The bad part is that they really don't fit in with the normal Drupal account creation process. If you're just looking for someone to be able to authenticate temporarily to add a comment they work great. If you want someone to be able to quickly create a full account, with access to all of the features of your site, with Google, Facebook or Twitter credentials then the modules fall short. What seems to work best is a hybrid approach where a user first creates an account on your site and then later connects to their account on the social network. After that they can log in with one of these services (provided you add the right links) and get all the benefits of a member of your site.
Bookmark or Share Post
