I use wordpress as my primary blogging platform. Sure, this blog is hosted at blogger - but my family blogs are all on wordpress (hosted by me). For a while I was using an OpenID plugin to provide authentication on those wordpress blogs but with the recent release of Wordpress 2.5 the plugin no longer works.
Not only does it not work it is totally busted due to the changes in the security framework of Wordpress. I’ll be lucky to see any OpenID integration for quite a while and that, to me, is pretty unacceptable at this point in time.
Wordpress claims to be a platform that is dedicated to it’s users and extending blogging yet they refuse to support OpenID and I can only think it is due to pettiness. One of Wordpress’s main rivals in the blogging business is Moveable Type. Moveable Type seems to keep it’s guns aimed on Wordpress market share and even tries to hype itself by contrasting its features versus those of Wordpress. Moveable Type is also created by “Six Apart” which is one of the initial groups that helped develop OpenID (I’m thinking OpenID was their idea in fact but I’m not sure).
So, I can’t help but wonder, is Wordpress refusing to support OpenID just because it’s a Moveable Type initiative? I certainly hope not.