Leancode

Mephisto is still developing, but seems to be coming into its own as a blog engine of choice for Rails.

Since Mephisto does not yet have OpenID support in its trunk, this seemed like a good project as the running example for my peepcode screencast on OpenID.

There is some very active ongoing work, though, that if I go forward with Mephisto I will certainly build on. Here’s the latest I know of.

First, is Justin at transphorm’s Mephisto port of the OpenID Consumer plug-in for Rails. Normally, outside of Mephisto, the OpenID Consumer plug-in could be be used in conjunction with a authentication generator like ActsAsAuthenticated. Justin’s port is nearly fully baked, but does require hand editing several significant areas.

Second is Frank’s work at nullsense, which builds on Justin’s port and works to turn it into a full Mephisto plugin. This work isn’t yet released (and, when it is, may require some changes in Mephisto trunk), but it looks like a full Mephisto plug-in for OpenID is imminent.

For myself, where I want to show adding OpenID to Rails from the ground up, this raises some question of doing the screencast with Mephisto or with a project where there is no existing OpenID activity that i know of.

Also, if Mephisto remains the direction, there’s the question of whether OpenID should be a standard feature in Mephisto trunk, or kept separate as a plug-in.

If anyone has thoughts, let me know!