Hello world. Had a lazy weekend again, which was pretty nice.

I wonder how contacts / relationships would work between distributed and federated social networking nodes? How would groups look? How would something akin to the Facebook Platform work?

A Curmudgeon Playing with the CodeIgniter Framework and OpenID

• One bit of hackery I did this weekend was to explore the CodeIgniter PHP framework, which is even less magic yet more glued-together out of the box than the Zend Framework. Also, very much less magic than CakePHP and barely in the same universe as Symfony. I think I may have found my sweet spot of simplicity and comprehensible magic.

• CodeIgniter has is a PHP 4 / 5 framework that provides a lightweight Model / View / Controller arrangement with URL routing and a useful but minimal constellation of utility classes and helpers. The view templates are in PHP, with just a bit of pre-processing. The controllers are plain-old PHP classes whose methods are called via simple URL routes.

• The model layer of CodeIgniter, however, is the weakest part of the trio - which I actually like a lot. It's not a magical ORM - instead it's just a simple superclass from which to derive, mostly there to suggest that a separate model is a good thing to write. The DB abstraction classes just make the job of writing SQL statements easier and don't pretend that there's no impedance mismatch between objects and relational tables.

• The depth of code in CodeIgniter is shallow enough that I felt I was able to get into developing quickly while still taking side trips through the framework methods I was calling and get at least a glance at what being taken care of for me. There's always danger in magic, but this stuff doesn't really get out of hand.

• To doodle around with an idea, I threw together a layout decorator class to support the sort of nested templates I'm used to from Symfony. Out of the box, CI views are simple, offering facilities for calling sub-templates and "partials" but not directly providing conventions for such. My first swatches of code add a bit of that.

• After playing around with layouts, the next thing I did was to use CI sessions and the PHP OpenID Library to develop both an auth producer and consumer. CodeIgniter doesn't come with a ready-made user auth system, though it does come with its own implementation of sessions using encrypted browser cookies to replace PHP's native sessions - another feature I really like.

• Kind of odd - but on the same toy app I can sign up for local accounts, sign into other sites with OpenID URLs based on local accounts, and sign into my CI app with external OpenID identities.

• The wild bit is that I can even sign in locally with one OpenID URL, then use the newly created local profile to get a second OpenID URL to sign in somewhere else. Seems interesting yet possibly dangerous. I mostly just glued the right parts together and got the Auth_OpenID black-box modules working - now that I have an operational OpenID system, I need to study it further.

• The next thing I want to do is work more on profile managment, offer some of the OpenID Simple Registration fields, and look into supporting multiple auth IDs linked to the same user profile.

• It might also be fun to do something like "catalogue the sites that a user logs into and automatically construct a homepage." Overall, I've got some vague notional ideas to build a personal status collector and maybe some federated social networking and messaging stuff. But, one hack at a time.

• Hopefully, I'll get this code I've got so far into better shape and commit to my SVN repository. Sooner than later, otherwise it'll never get off my dev box.