QED42 Blog

OmniAuth for external authentication with rails

madhu — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 08:15:53 +0000

Omniauth is a pretty simple solution if you want your users to authenticate using oauth and openid providers. Its based on the principle that

Every authentication system can essentially be boiled down into two "phases".

Request phase : we request information from the user that is necessary to complete authentication. This information may be POSTed to a URL or performed externally through an authentication process such as OpenID.

Callback phase : In the Callback Phase, we receive an authenticated unique identifier that can differentiate this user from other users of the same authentication system. Additionally, we may provide user information that can be automatically harvested by the application to fill in the details of the authenticating user.

Omniauth doesn't handle your session, it mainly focuses on bringing you the required data from the provider and its upto you to manage the session. You can use any authentication system in rails to do that e.g devise, restful_authentication, authlogic etc. OmniAuth is the best solution for seamless integration of multiple authentication providers.

The Omniauth library was released by intridea and is a Rack based authentication system.

Idea

User is sent to /auth/:provider (provider can be twitter, facebook or any other), where he authenticates using the provider, and he returns to the callback url which is always /auth/:provider/callback. You just have to map /auth/:provider/callback to a controller action, where you get the response data in a hash.

Implementation

Include config.gem "omniauth" in your environment.rb file and run rake gems:install. You might get "libxml" missing, for that you should do apt-get for libxslt-dev and libxml3-dev. This should install omniauth.

Create config/initializers/omniauth.rb. You can choose from the list of providers

Generate the Authorization model.

script/generate model authorization provider:string uid:string user_id:integer
rake db:migrate

This is how your model should look like. In the authorization model, we are storing the provider, unique id of the user within the provider and the user_id. The combination of provider and the uid is always unique.

Create a route for the callback url. In the "create" method of authorization controller we handle the data received from provider. (you can handle this in any controller, action). If the user denies giving access to his information, it will be routed back to /auth/failure. So make sure you have defined a path for that as well.

map.callback "/auth/:provider/callback", :controller => "authorizations", :action => "create"
map.failure "/auth/failure", :controller => "authorizations", :action => "failure"

In the authorization controller define the "create", "failure" and "destroy" methods.

The current_user method used above returns the user in the current session. The create method does the job of

Collecting the information sent by the provider (which is available in request.env['rack.auth'])
Checks if the user has already authorized using the provider. If he has not and is logged in, it will associate the provider with users current account.
It will create a new account if the user is registering for the first time with oauth and openid providers

You need a few methods in the authorization model to find and create authorizations.

In the user model

Thats it! This is the set up you need. Here is the demo of omniauth configured with authlogic for rails 2.3.x and its full source code.

Resources :

Railscasts Episode 235: OmniAuth Part 1
Railscasts Episode 236: OmniAuth Part 2
Separating Authentication and Identity with OmniAuth
Omniauth wiki

Drush - drupal productivity messiah

dipen — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:05:11 +0000

Drush is a shell and command line interface for drupal where in you can do 90% of the routine tasks quicker; whether you are maintaining or developing a site. Drush is such an indispensable tool that you can really break down your developer experience in two ages: BD (before Drush) and AD (After Drush). If you were lured by a module in BD age, the drill was something like:

Find the module project page.
Choose the correct module version number.
Download or checkout (CVS) the correct module version.
Place the module directory into your sites/all/modules (or wherever).
Locate the module amidst the long list at admin/build/modules page.
Choose the module and install it.

This experience often made me feel like a click zombie and my development environment and methodologies as a den of time suckage. Really there are more sadistic drills in the drupal verse when you talk about BD. Then came drush, messiah for the click zombies who wanted to mend and do more and they did find happily ever after. The above drill is achieved in 2 steps in AD:

drush dl <module name> ( It will find the correct stable version depending on your site configuration and drupal version or you could specify version num for advance usage. Neat? )
drush en <module name> ( Would prompt you to enable dependencies if any)

All this at the coziness of your terminal, above is one scenario among many time sucking and boring routines. Drush can do much more, it can empty your cache, it can update your site from command line, it can do releases and hundred other things. So much thanks to Arto, Moshe Weitzman, Owen Barton, Adrian Rossouw, greg.1.anderson and other drush contributors for making drush and liberating thousands of click zombies whose life otherwise would have been a lot less productive.

I'll leave you with a cool presentation on what more you can achieve and do with drush. Drush is a revelation to drupal developer experience and I will follow up this post with lot of drush and drush like goodies like drush make in future.

Drush: More Beer, Less Effort

Dont out-spend, out-teach your competition

sids — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 03:55:01 +0000

A snippet from a DHH talk on entepreneurship at Stanford where he emphasises that instead of trying to outspend your competition in advertising, to build a sustainable business you should rather build an audience by educating about your product and your company. A DHH Jewel. You can watch the entire talk here.

Essential elements of a social networking site

madhu — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 02:43:26 +0000

Its probably a moot point to suggest that social networking sites are the rage these days. Thanks to the success of facebook, twitter, myspace and orkut, most of the sites now have a strong social component to them. So is the social networking space overcrowded? Maybe, but dont let that discourage you. As we pointed out in a previous blog post there's still a lot of scope here. So what makes a social networking site successful ? What are the key components and features that a social networking site should have. We at qed42 are web dwellers and continuously trying to deconstruct the web and we have the answer for you. The essential elements which you should keep in mind while building a social networking site.

Registration Form : Keep your registration form as simple as possible. Broken down to the bare bones a simple email and password field may suffice but you may want to include fields for first and last name.
Profile and Feed : Ideally this will be the most viewed page of your website. Apart from the general fields remember to keep fields which will be of interest to other users and which will be in coherence with the general theme of your site. You can check out the profile pages of couchsurfing.org specially in reference to the last point. Here's one. Also as facebook and twitter have proved its a good idea to have a "what are you thinking/doing" feed. Even linkedin has one now. So do some of the other sites like brazen careerist.
Easy interaction between users : The success of a social networking site is based on the conversation of its users. So make it easy for users to communicate between each other either actively or even observe what other users and their connections are doing. Also it should be easy to communicate with users of other sites, for example through FBConnect or even their twitter id.
UI : Having a simple yet interactive user interface is a must for a successful User Experience. If the UX is good users will return to your site. One of the ways to keep the UI interactive is by using ajax and javascript. Page refresh should also be reduced to as minimum as possible. Some other things to consider are
- A navigation menu which lets the user access all the elements of the site of which he is a part of.
- Layouts should be consistent. Header and footer should take no more than 30% of your real estate, if possible may be even less. User should be able to see the content in any resolution. If its not so you may end up in a situation that if the user is at a low resolution, the header occupies 50% of the page and he may need to scroll multiple times.
- Logo should be the identity of your site and it must be clickable!
Ability to import users from other sites : One of the key reasons why facebook was successful over orkut was that it gave the option to people to import their contacts from gmail and other email providers. This helped in the viral growth of facebook and is one of the major reasons why facebook is what it is.
Search : Your site should have the option to search through users, communities etc. Ideally if the user is new you can even suggest him what networks might be interesting to him based on his location or interests

These are some of the few things which we believe are the ingredients of a successful social networking site. Did we miss out on anything? Let us know in comments or contact us.

Potential of location based services

dipen — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 17:07:38 +0000

Its almost paradoxical that the internet, that helped in making the world a smaller place has local as its next major focus area, but there has been a spate of activity in the local internet space in the last year which seems to suggest so. While this space has seen a lot of new services coming up, even the established players are trying to a get a piece of the local pie.

One of the most talked about startup of last year was foursquare. It is a hybrid between a social game and a city guide. You discover interesting places in your city and share it with your friends. It adds the gaming aspect by awarding you points and badges for going to your favorite hangout spots. It already has the early adopters hooked and bloggers like robert scoble, techcrunch and mashable vouching for it. Initially it was limited to some cities but very recently they removed this restriction. Although they do not have a business model as of yet,they already are encouraging interesting discussions about how they can monetize their service. Very similar in the mode of foursquare are other apps like gowalla and mytown. Another app with more focus on the social than the gaming part is Loopt.

Even some of the established players are venturing into this space. Twitter announced last november that tweets can now be geo-tagged, which will allow people to know where you tweeted from. Google launched their Google Latitude service which allows you to share with your friends where you are. There is also another interesting service called Glympse which is competing with Goggle Latitude in this space. Also the portals like msn, yahoo and aol also have turned their attentions towards getting a bigger share of the local advertising share.

Turning our attentions closer to India, while they may not be apps or truly internet based services, I personally think JustDial is doing a very good job of solving the problem of a local business listing in India. They have very cleverly used the intersection of phone,sms and internet to make giant strides and are an indispensable service for me.

What i would love to have though is a service which gives me a good listing of the events happening around me. Do you have an idea for a location based service that you would like to bring to life ? Tell us about it.

Kaal - Drupal 6 theme

madhu — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 15:29:10 +0000

Kaal is a port of a wordpress theme to drupal. A pro-blogger theme which can have "ads" in the blog. It is a three column theme which you can use for your blog. It uses Blueprint CSS framework. This is a sub theme of drupal's blueprint project. So please download and install the blueprint base theme (follow the install instructions for installing blueprint as base theme) if you chose to install kaal as sub theme. We have also provided an option to download it as a standalone theme.

Features

Three column
Fixed width
It has two sidebars,a AD's sidebar which can be used to display AD's with a right sidebar.
Its tableless which makes it light weight.
Uses blueprint CSS framework, which takes care of browser compatibility issues.

It has been tested for browser compatibility and it works fine in most of the widely used browsers.

Theme version

Drupal version

Downloads

Date

sub theme v1.0

6.x

Download

Dec 20, 2009

standalone v1.0

6.x

Download

Dec 20, 2009

This is the first official theme release of QED42, we would be releasing more themes in future and all under GPL. Would love to hear your feedback in comments and suggestions for future theme releases.

Niche Social Networks – Why do they matter?

sids — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:19:59 +0000

In the deluge of news about twitter, facebook and other social networks behemoths like MySpace we often fail to take into account the power of domain specific or niche social networks. What are they? – They are social networks which involve people with the same interest and these networks revolve around this interest. They operate on the principle that if you bring people with a similar interest together the selling will take care of itself. Let’s take a look at some of them.

LinkedIn can be put into this category as it’s a social network with the purpose of business networking for professionals. Wayn is a lifestyle and travel social network with a stated aim of uniting travellers all over the world. Then there is classmates.com, probably the first social networking website which helps people keep in touch with long lost friends with whom they once shared a classroom. These are just a few examples of a huge list of niche social networks. Then of course there is Ning which is a collection of more than 1 million social networks in itself. These are just a few of the niche social networks. There are a whole lot of them. If you want to have a look at more just take a look at this.

Niche social networks help in eliminating a lot of noise from the system and help you target a specific audience. Also as a report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau shows that 66% of all internet users would click on online ads if they made sense to them. In traditional social networking sites people tend to block out the ads, only when the ads are personalized or context-driven are people interested. This again is much easier in the context of a niche social network.

So what are the implications? If you want to build a social network targeted to a specific group of people; go ahead build one but make sure it adds enough value for people to justify creating their profile in yet another social network. Be reasonable in the assumption that your user base might not be as huge as facebook. What is important is that you have the right kind of users. Also be mindful of the fact that your backers may not be with very deep pockets so have a sound business plan with ROI in mind. If you are seeking social media marketing for your brand or are a social media strategist, ignore Niche social networks at your own peril. With sites like Ning it’s very easy for you to build your own social network even with limited resources.

One might ask will such networks be deemed redundant in the future by the social networking giants. I don’t think so. They serve their own purpose and will exist side by side with the giants. So what do you think about niche social networks? Are they just more noise? Will they hold their place or will they eventually be blown out by the Facebooks of the world? Do let us know in the comments.