Unified Login

Virtualmin
1

We’re using Virtualmin for a community site. Lots of users. Lots of CMSs.

We’d LOVE a way to have a user have a single login that would work for the various CMSs we have: blogs, forums, wikis, mail lists, etc, etc. Instead, each user has to repeat the registration for every new service.

Is there a way to avoid this? Virtualmin handles this nicely for things like admin logins for CMSs … mysql defaults to the admin user for example. Ditto for most install scripts. Any way to extend this to users?

I’ve heard OpenID is a solution that some CMSs use for a web-wide login so that you don’t have to keep creating a new login for Drupal on every website. But I don’t think that solves the problem on a single system across multiple CMSs.

2

I’m afraid this is something that has to happen within the apps themselves, which we’ll never have the resources to tackle (it would mean we’d have to maintain a big chunk of code in every application we provide–it’d probably end up being more coding effort than all of our current codebases combined). OpenID is a good solution to the problem, and some friends of ours are building an easy-to-use OpenID solution called ClickPass, which might be worth looking into. You can find them here: http://www.clickpass.com

I suspect OpenID will, within the next year, become popular enough to be incorporated in most of your favorite apps.