WordPress OpenID support
I installed this WordPress OpenID plugin this morning and played around with it a little. While the installation was fairly smooth, I couldn’t manage to get it to work in what I considered a sensible fashion. I’m sure if I spent an hour or so fiddling with it I could figure it out, but to me that means the plugin needs more work. Fiddling shouldn’t be required.
The first problem is that while I could make the OpenID login form appear above the comment box on a post, if I typed my OpenID URL and a comment and hit the submit button, it would log me in but bring me back to the (now empty) comment form, and my comment would be nowhere to be seen. If I’m given a login box and a comment box, it ought to perform both actions.
Second, once I had logged in with my OpenID identity, the “Logged in as” text that appeared above the comment form was ugly and I couldn’t easily figure out how to style it. It would be nice if the plugin options included text boxes that let me directly enter the styles for the various elements that it adds to my pages.
Third, and this is more a complaint about the WordPress architecture, I don’t like that my administrator login and a low-level commenter’s profile page both have the same URL and look nearly the same. I think the commenter’s profile page should be a totally separate file that I can lay out and style however I like.
I’d love to enable OpenID support on my blog, but these issues (especially the first) are deterring me.
