I think most of us have at least heard of OpenID. Yeah, we know that it's cool, we know that it's built into Drupal 6, we know that it will be the next big thing, etc, etc. We know all that. And many of us have heard too that OpenID has new final specs for v2.0 that Drupal 6 already supports (James Walker writes about it if you missed it).

But really, when it comes to OpenID, I don't know what's more surprising: how well it works or the very small number of Drupal sites that have enabled it so far. That’s the case even though there’s already this nice Drupal 5 OpenID module that makes it quick and easy to deploy OpenID in a website. 

It may take until Drupal 6 is out for us to see widespread adoption of OpenID, since it will be included in Drupal core. But I don't know why we can't start enjoying it now. The Drupal 5 module works fine and setting it up is really no work at all. And we do all face the same problem of working with lots of websites and having the resulting huge list of login/passwords to remember.

Here’s how it works:

For Users1. Get your OpenID. There are several free options.2. Use your OpenID. (Why not in every Drupal site out there?)

For Site Administrators1. Grab the Drupal 5 OpenID module2. Enable it on your website.

Once it’s enabled, the login looks like this:

And yes, it really works! It’s easy for administrators and users. Users will be able to still use their normal Drupal login and password, but guess what...they won't want anymore! :-)