Amazingly Automatic Authentication

One of the best ways to improve the community around your weblog is to encourage accountability. But to make that happen, you have to have a consistent identity for each of the people who contributes comments to your site, so that you can know who each person is. This is especially important in Movable Type 3.2, where each commenter has an individual page where a blog owner can see all of that person's comments across all the blogs in the system.

To make this kind of accountability possible, we introduced the TypeKey authentication service last year. Since then, millions of people have signed in with the service, and dozens of tools have sprung up around TypeKey, either serving as replacements for the authentication service, as connections to other services which can be used in place of TypeKey, or to let you use your TypeKey account on other sites.

Enabling TypeKey on Movable Type sites has been unnecessarily complex, though. So with the release of Movable Type 3.2, we're introducing a big step forward.

TypeKey in three clicks

How does it work? Well, if you're logged into TypeKey, (and these days, it's easy, since TypeKey remembers your login status.) you can start just by visiting the Feedback Settings for your blog. Here's you'll find the "Setup Authentication" button.

Click the button, and you'll be taken to your TypeKey account, where it will verify the address of your Movable Type installation and your account name. Click "return to Movable Type" and you'll be back at your blog's Feedback Settings.

Once you're back in, your TypeKey authentication token's been entered into the application, so all you need to do is click "Save Changes" at the bottom of the settings page and TypeKey is enabled for your blog.

Now you've got a consistent way to manage your commenters. And you can give privileges to certain trusted authenticated commenters, such as having their comments appear without moderation, that reward them for helping encourage accountability on your site. Plus, if you have community members who prefer not to be authenticated, you have the option to include their contributions as well, with full control over how their feedback is displayed and whether it's displayed by default.

[This is part twenty-five in a series called "Our 32 Favorite Features of Movable Type 3.2".]