Enabled Comments from AOL/AIM, Yahoo, Movable Type, WordPress, LiveJournal, OpenID, or Vox users

June 27, 2008

Movable Type 4.0+ has several plugins that utilize Movable Type's extensible Open ID Login framework to give a customized login experience for AOL/AIM, Yahoo, Movable Type, WordPress, LiveJournal, or Vox users on Movable Type blogs. The logon requirements for AOL/AIM, Yahoo, Movable Type, WordPress, LiveJournal, and Vox all support OpenID which makes this possible.

On any blog entry you'll see the following text near the Comments form:

Sign in to comment using AOL/AIM, Yahoo, Movable Type, WordPress, LiveJournal, OpenID, or Vox. Or comment anonymously.

Once you click Sign In you'll see this cool new sign-in screen with multiple Open ID providers.
movable type sign in screen open id

If I click on Yahoo for instance, you'll see this screen:
movable type sign in screen yahoo open id

Some of these plugins do have further requirements to get it to work.

The Yahoo! plugin requirements:

Movable Type 4.2
Crypt::SSLeay Perl Module

The AOL/AIM plugn requirements:

Movable Type version 4.0 or above.
Digest::SHA1 Perl module. Run mt-check.cgi for information on how to obtain it.

The others probably use the same components.

sample MyBlogLog Readers widget

Additionally, there is a flaw in the onload javascript command with Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) when used with MyBlogLog, a cool javascript-based widget that shows your recent readers/visitors to your blog, lets you view web stats, and with the right plugin you can get avatars in your comments.

Whenever I have the MyBlogLog widget enabled, it conflicts with Movable Type's " body onload" command. i.e. my blog has this in the HTML code:
<body id="mt-blog" class="mt-entry-archive layout-wtt" onload="mtEntryOnLoad()">

For some reason MyBlogLog overrides or conflicts with Movable Type's onload command. Technically, it's an Internet Explorer 7 bug and not MyBlogLog's fault. Still, MyBlogLog is used on a lot of Movable Type blogs and they should offer an alternative method. I should point out that FireFox and Opera can see the "Sign in" message just fine. So it's only IE7. I think IE6 and earlier work but haven't tested it.

In theory I can change Movable Type's default mt.js javascript file to use an alternate event, but I really would rather not mess with the MT 4.2 default templates too much. Opens up a whole can of worms. So I've disabled MyBlogLog until I can figure out how to fix the problem.

Well, enjoy the new login features. I haven't tested all of them yet (WordPress & Yahoo in particular) so feel free to post a comment to test this.

And if you're also running MT4 and are interested in enabling comments from AOL/AIM, Yahoo, Movable Type, WordPress, LiveJournal, OpenID, or Vox users, go download the following MT 4 plugins: