03 January 2011
Posted in Tools & Services

With Web 2.0 now fully matured, most designers are facing clients who are seeking to increase market share through community or user-centric web site projects and one of the greatest barriers to user participation is web users' hesitation to register at “yet another” web site.

However, there is a new technology that is growing rapidly that allows users to create an account and access your web site by using their Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo, LinkedIn or Open ID account. This new technology is called Social Sign-In. 

How does it work?

Surely you have seen this on some sites already. Somewhere near the site's login area, there is an option to sign in with Facebook or Twitter. When you click it, you are shown a popup window that is accessed via the site (or in some cases, you are even taken to the site) and asked to login and allow access.

Once you have done this, you are then returned to the original site and, VOILA, you now have an account and access. Further, you are also able to very easily now share information from this new site with your social media site.

How is this implemented?

Depending on the site you are building, implementation can be very simple or can require some in-depth knowledge of the various API's made available by sites like Facebook and Twitter.

For this article, we are going to talk about one way that The Dev Department has been working to implement these.

We begin by creating a free Janrain Engage account and connecting the account to all of our various social media accounts. Each account will be a little different, but Janrain is excellent about walking you through the various steps.

After we have configured the various providers, we then implement either a login widget or create our own form that performs a callback to our site. This is very similar to situations where you might implement paypal payments in that you have to tell Janrain where the user will be returned after they have been logged into the social media site.

Since most of what The Dev Department does is Joomla!, we have some Joomla! modules that do most of the work of sending the user to Janrain, returning them to our site and either logging them into the correctly associate Joomla! user account or create a new account an association.

Once this is done, we can then create additional records that are associated with their account or any number of other things.

A few things to note!

The most important thing to remember here is you will need to be able to associate the social account with a local user account. So you are sort of maintaining two accounts.

Another thing is that, although you will have information about the users social media account, you will not have free reign of their information, so you may need to get some additional API tools or do some coding to have that.

Finally, it is important to remember with Janrain that a user must use the same account to login to your site. So, if a user access your Joomla! site the first time using Twitter and the second using Facebook, Joomla! will create two separate accounts for that user.