I’ve released a new version of Scrumptious. Main change is it now supports Open ID. You can click a “login” link to comment by Open ID. It’s optional by default, though a Scrumptious site operator could easily make it mandatory for read, write, or both by just changing a couple of words in the “policy” config files. Similar to other CMSs like WordPress, non logged in users can indicate their name and URL when they submit a comment.

There are also UI enhancements - the design is cleaner and looks closer to the original original TiddlyWiki comments plugin. Interestingly, I retained almost identical markup, so I was able to cut-and-paste the original CSS for the comments plugin and it mostly worked. I also now include the default TiddlyWiki stylesheets as well. It’s not just look-and-feel which is closer to the original plugin, but the content - you now have info like modifier, modified date, and a permalink available.

I also added something I always wanted to add on the original plugin, which is some animation, e.g. when you add a new reply, the page scrolls to that reply, and a yellow fade effect highlights it. This is a genuinely useful feature as I was finding it difficult to see which reply I’d just added, when there are a lot of comments around.

I’ve also begun work on a Comments Report showing recent comments. Obvious related enhancement is to take the TiddlyWeb Atom plugin and make a comments feed.

Right now, all this is only tested on Firefox (the original was tested on all browsers, at least the full website view); my next priority is to work on browser compatibility, and after that, extract a modular JQuery comments plugin.

Implementation Notes

Regarding the implementation, TiddlyWeb ships with Open ID by default (Open ID is one of two default challengers, the other being the usual simple user-pass key pair config). The most challenging thing here was getting the UI right for both anonymous users and logged in users, as well as handling a redirect in the popup after a successful login; but at the back end, Open ID “just works”.

In summary, I added Open ID support as follows:

  • Add a "login" link to the TiddlyWeb OpenID challenger UI, using a "target" attribute so the challenger opens in a popup.
  • The challenger URL in that link also contains a redirect param, which I redirected to a new static page. This static page shows the user their login ID (by inspecting the "tiddlyweb_user" cookie value), calls a callback "onLogin" method on the original page, and closes itself.
  • The "onLogin" callback updates the login display to show the logged in user and a logout link; the logout link simply runs some Javascript to remove the cookie. The callback also updates any forms that are open prompting for bio info; it hides this info and in its place, shows the current user ID (read-only).

Thanks to Ben and Chris for pointing me in the right direction on TiddlyWeb’s Open ID support.

PS I discovered late in the day (literally) that TiddlyWeb lets the client specify whatever modifier they want