Apologies: what does this module do?

It's not the fault of the description - I just don't conceptually understand openID.
I *want* to understand, but I just don't 'get it'.
I've read dozens of pages of information on openID, but I'm still totally clueless.
I still don't even know what it is supposed to *do* and why it is better than a username and password.

Assuming:
I have a drupal website at mydomain.com
I have a personal openID at http://my.name.myopenid.com

1)
As an end-user I know I can sign into some websites with my personal openID.
But I really don't understand the point of it?

2)
As a drupal website administrator, how can openID help me and my users?

3)
How can this module specifically help me and my users?

I'm especially interested in the above answers with relation to the fact that my main website is a school website. Not all children have email addresses, and my plan was to switch email authentication off with the 'local_email' module. However, if openID offers an alternative way of getting the pupils authenticated without having to own an email address, I'd be very interested to hear about it.

Cheers.

Comments

robloach’s picture

robloach
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commented
  1. If you log into a website using your own OpenID (http://my.name.myopenid.com), you're keeping your password to yourself, because only your OpenID server has it. You're not giving it away to the third party website that you're logging into.
  2. OpenID provides two things from my standpoint as a site administrator: 1) Security. Because the authentication process is pushed to a third party OpenID server, you won't have to worry about maintaining that huge list of usernames and passwords. 2) Usability. People who take advantage of OpenID will only have to remember one username and password for all of the sites they visit.
  3. This module is the OpenID URL module. It isn't an OpenID server, yet it acts as one, delegating the OpenID authentication to another OpenID server. Usually, when you log into an OpenID-enabled website, you put in your OpenID server (http://my.name.myopenid.com). Although this is handy, it doesn't help you if MyOpenID goes down, or starts charging for their service. By using OpenID URL and delegating the OpenID process, you can use any service, and still use the same OpenID URL when logging into OpenID-enabled sites. So, when you're logging into an OpenID-enabled website, instead of using http://my.name.myopenid.com, use http://mywebsite.com, which has the OpenID URL module enabled and configured. Yay!

In your case, it sounds like you want people to be able to log into to your own website through some neato authentication method. With OpenID URL, you can delegate a user profile page as an OpenID URL. So, if someone puts in their OpenID delegate information into their user profile, they could log into an OpenID-enabled website by using http://example.com/user/4....

robloach’s picture

robloach
he/him
commented
Title: Apologies: what does this module do? » Additional documentation
Version: 6.x-1.3 » 6.x-1.x-dev

If anyone would like to write up some additional documentation for this, I'd be glad to commit it to the hook_help function.

robloach’s picture

robloach
he/him
commented
Status: Active » Needs work
ao2’s picture

ao2 commented
Issue summary: View changes
Status: Needs work » Closed (won't fix)

The module is about supporting OpenID for people who need it, and those people are likely to know already what OpenID is.
So I am closing this as "won't fix".

For people who find this module by accident and are curious about what OpenID is, I added a link to the OpenID wikipedia page on the project summary page.