Yes indeed – I now have been able to create accounts on a Wordpress site, hook those accounts up to use a GAFYD as OpenID to log in to Wordpress using the same credentials as the email hosted at Google (under a custom domain.)

Phew.

How does it work? I’m glad I asked!

The key part of the puzzle was to use the Janrain Wordpress plugin that uses RPX discovery. Yeah, ‘RPX discovery’ sounds like gibberish but it is really important. Google have created their own discovery mechanism (read about it from the creator of the WP OpenID plugin) which just makes things just a little more difficult from our point of view.

In any case, once the RPX plugin is installed it will prompt you to create an account at http://rpxnow.com/ which is both painless and takes only seconds.

Next we will have to manually set the users up in Wordpress. So create your new Wordpress user, make a password (and yes, you do still need a strong password here because it remains a way to login to your Wordpress site for the users.) I chose not to email the password out to the user, as the goal here is to present a single sign on solution.

Moving along – log yourself out of Wordpress and log back in as the new user you just created. Navigate to the Profile panel for that user in the Administration area. The URL will be something like http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/profile.php Down the bottom of that screen you’ll see an area to select a Sign-in Provider. The key is to select OpenID, then enter the base URL for your domain that is active at Google apps. So you would type http://yourdomain.com in.

Finally you’ll have to sign-in using that OpenID to create the link between this user account on your Wordpress install and the account at Google apps which is the single sign on account we want our users to use.

The first time I went around the OpenID authentication I was returned to the from page of my blog with some errros on screen. Ignoring those and going back to the /wp-admin page seems to work fine. For some reason it works out fine after that.

So there you have my solution to use the credentials of your user’s email accounts hosted by Google Apps For Your Domain (GAFYD) to log into a Wordpress blog. Feedback is more than welcome, comments, tweaks, suggestions all. Get connecting!

P.S. A friend of mine has found a differing solution, Wordpress.com for your domain – where you host your website at Wordpress.com, still allowing Google to handle your email with GAFYD. This does not offer a single sign on, however you do get a website plus email for only $US10 per year. Great work Jodie!

Searching the Wordpress plugin repository I’ve come up with these potential solutions:

• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/3rd-party-authentication/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/openid/installation/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rpx/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-google-apps/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/opensso-plugin/changelog/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gigya-socialize-for-wordpress/

Now some of those look like they would be more useful in allowing a wide range of authentication options for people just leaving comments on your blog, but some look like they’d have real potential.

If you have any experience with these I’d love to hear about it. In the meantime I’ll be working my way through these, testing which will provide the best solution for the Scout group.

UPDATES:
Testing WP Google Apps
Solved? Single sign on for Google apps and Wordpress

When you do, they will ask you to create a post with the following link in it : Technorati Profile

Now that I have done so, Technorati will come back and spider this site. Then I’ll be in!

Simply by adding two lines to your website you can add a poll, comments or even a ratings system. The basic tools are free to use (at the moment), with adds potentially being added into the items down the track.

Perhaps when there are stats to see I will show some of them off. That’s right, not only do you get stats on your Dashboard, you can place them on your blog.

Fine, I’ll try to drop todays visits in here :

[nope, not working ... I'll have to dig a little first]

• Yahoo Sidebar Link Badge Widget
• Newsletter Plugin this is a commercial plugin that allows you to create and manage an web-based newsletter and mailing list within the WordPress environment.
• Ultimate Tag Warrior for all the tagging you could ever want – looks like it is about to get a major overhaul, possibly to address performance issues
• Simple Tagging Plugin was created to be fast, with an auto-complete feature as well
• WP-Amazon is there to help you find and link to Amazon for any product you may blog about – with support for your Amazon Associates ID (so you can earn money when readers click through and purchase!)
• The Hacker’s Diet Plugin which you can use to input your weight everyday for calculating and tracking your weight trend based off the guidance and formulas used in the book, The Hacker’s Diet. (Yes, yours truly should be on this diet any minute now!)
• Nike+ iPod Stats plugin can retrieve your personal data and formats it to display correctly on your Wordpress blog. (Once again yours truly should be doing this as well … once the iPod fairy delivers.)

The range of possibilities is truly endless, these are just a sampling of the plugins you can install in your own Wordpress installation – so look forward to the new accounts signup page where you can start hosting your own Fantastic blog in your own Fantastic way!

activeCollab – open source project management and collaboration tool.

The over-riding goal is to provide a high-quality collaboration tool, which is something we have to applaud. It looks nice, too.