Wordpress.com and OpenID

Every Wordpress.com blog is an OpenID Identifier! This is awesome news! Identity urls are the top-level blog urls, and look like http://username.wordpress.com/.

The WP.com Identify Provider interface is fairly sparse, with decent spoof-protection. As in, the landing pages are completely devoid of any links to Wordpress.com proper.

As expected, this is compatible with the WPOpenID plugin, letting self-hosted blogs consume Wordpress.com identity urls.

A few oddities

There is no Yadis XML document being produced, only the rel=”openid.server” html header. In addition to the top-level blog url, all posts and pages contain the following text:

<link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://user.wordpress.com/?openidserver=1″ />

My dream is, of course, to drop this plugin entirely, and have all the Wordpress code (WP, WP.com, WPMU, BBPress) consume and produce OpenID identities. It’s going to take a lot of work, but this is an excellent step in the right direction.