Re: [Social-discuss] The Case for Branching Elgg?

[Story Henry]

On 30 Mar 2010, at 14:29, Pablo Martin wrote:

> * foaf: like melvin says the views need some work but the basics are
> there. no foaf+ssl but the foaf you get will have the information you
> have access to.

Adding foaf should be easy. If it has a home page in HTML, you just mark it up 
with
RDFa. That is what I did on xwiki. Adding an rdf/xml representation of the home 
page
is another option.

Adding foaf+ssl can be done in two steps:

  1. Add a certificate generator. 
  -------------------------------

   At its easiest this is a form with a <keygen> element. This forces the 
browser to create a public/private key. On the server side you receive this key 
generation request and process it. foaf.me has the code to do this. Then you 
add the public key modulus and exponent to your DB and publish that in the foaf 
home page.

  (To get it to work with IE is a bit more work, but we have the javascript dom 
manipulation code to do that) 

   The above cannot be that much work, as Melvin has most of it written already 
in php. I guess it could even be 1 days work to get the basics

   With the above you can log into other foaf+ssl enabled sites to test your 
work.

  2. Allow login to Elgg
  ----------------------

  2.1 Local login
  ---------------

   Allow local users to log in

   Melvin has the code for that too. You can get the WebId from the 
certificate. Once you have a WebId. then you can lookup the local user whose 
WebId it is, and give him access

  2.2 Remote login
  ----------------

   Allow members of other Elgg instances access. Here they login with their 
WebId from some other site. Now the nice thing is that you could use this to 
decide what type of authorisation they should have. For example if the remote 
user is a friend of someone on the local Elgg instance then they could see his 
full profile.
    
   So you can add foaf+ssl in stages. Depending on how Elgg is built 2.2 may be 
more or less work....

   I think the foaf+ssl community would love to help get Elgg going here, so 
you can count on us to help out. :-)


        Henry