Updated Mar 30, 2009 by muthuprasanna

DrupalPlugin

How to Install the Drupal plugin

First, install Friend Connect and get your Site ID

Sign up at the Friend Connect site.
Install the canvas.html and rpc_relay.html files on your site.
Get your Site ID.

see InstallFriendConnect for details.

Then, install the plugin

Download all files in the drupal/6.x directory to the sites/all/modules/friendconnect/ directory for your custom Drupal installation.
Activate the plugin by logging in as administrator (Site Building -> Modules -> Google Friend Connect).
Configure it by providing the Site ID (Site Configuration -> Google Friend Connect).

Caveats

The plugin currently does a page refresh on every Friend Connect login.
The custom authentication mechanism now relies on limited (plaintext) exposure of the unique Google Friend Connect user profile ID. A robust secure authentication mechanism is in the works.

How to use the plugin

1. The screenshot below shows the comment form in a custom Drupal 6.x installation (without the Friend Connect plugin), where you can post comments anonymously. If anonymous comments have been disabled, you'll see a "Login or register to post comments" message instead.

2. The screenshot below now shows the comment form with the Friend Connect plugin enabled, so you can login using Friend Connect to post comments on the site. Clicking on the "Join this site" button will open a new window to let you authenticate with Friend Connect.

3. You are now connected to the site. It has automatically created a local site account for you, linked it to your Friend Connect account, and synchronized your profile including your display name, thumbnail image, etc. No more hassles of registering for local accounts, waiting for the activation email to arrive in your inbox, and then remembering the username/password for that site forever. A single Friend Connect account, a single click, a single sign-on makes life easier!

4. You can now invite your friends to try this site out, and the Friend Connect plugin will mean they can login quickly too. You also get to change your Friend Connect settings, or signout of both the local site as well as the Friend Connect session. Any comment you now post will look like this example.

Troubleshooting

There are a few error cases that users might encounter using the current version of the Friend Connect plugin.

1. Currently, we only support creation of new local site accounts mapped to the user's Friend Connect account. If the user already has a local site account, we do not support the linking of this local account to Friend Connect. Hence, users already logged in would see this error message when they try to also activate the Friend Connect plugin action.

2. Bad attributes in the user settings in Friend Connect would also be flagged. However, as we check only for an unique profile ID and a corresponding name, this page should never be encountered by any site visitor.

3. Transient errors while running the Friend Connect plugin due to site overload or other performance reasons will show a "Try again later" message to the user. The site administrator can customize this message in the plugin code.

4. Finally, if we ever detect that the Friend Connect user is not correctly mapped to the local site user currently logged in, we will disable the display of the Friend Connect button as in the screenshot below, to remove ambiguity in user interface about "which account am I really using?".

Updates

The "404 error" issue has been fixed as of r89.
Browser incompatibility issues reported by a few people are being addressed now.
As this is a proof-of-concept module, it has not been released on drupal.org yet. We have been approached by a few interested Drupal enthusiasts who have expressed interest in making it production-grade and adding more features, so you can expect more updates soon.

Author:

Muthu Muthusrinivasan, Software Engineer, Google Inc. This feature was worked on during the author's 20% time.

Comment by onlyrey, Mar 14, 2009

Muthu,

This seems excellent. One question is how will users be able to know if they are being "phished" for their gmail password (for example) or they are loging into a site that genuinely uses friends connect.

Comment by xinghengwang, Mar 19, 2009

is there a block that I can use to show the google friend connect member thing? I hate having to edit the webpage with javascript, since I would be messing out the block layout of the website.

Comment by mbsunilk...@yahoo.com, Mar 21, 2009

After pressing "join this site" button and signing in the google account, it gave me a Error 404 Page not found error. I have copied those two html files to my web server public_html. Can you please guide me?

Regards, -S-

Comment by peter.vanhee, Mar 21, 2009

Muthu, are there any plans to release this on drupal.org? Many people will be reluctant to use your module until it is hosted there, and receives drupal-specific project management. Thanks, Peter

Comment by midorin.i, Mar 25, 2009

I aslo was punched out with Error 404. Oh!

Comment by writesuren, Mar 28, 2009

I get the 404 error too and also the plug in does not show up on the comment page.

Comment by globberbob, Mar 29, 2009

Mine just sits there at loading... where the "Join this site" button should be in comments... (Google Chrome)

operation aborted because it cant open the comment page (Internet Explorer)

Works (opera)

Any idea as to why?

Comment by nick98107, Apr 01, 2009

Any thoughts on a 5.x version?

Comment by keleding, Apr 01, 2009

where can I download the plugin?

Comment by midorin.i, Apr 02, 2009

I have insulated 404 error. Yeah! Try to keep 'Clean URL' off when install Drupal.

Comment by mikeloyst, Apr 02, 2009

onlyrey has raised a very serious point. Genuine users of Google friend connect should be able to display some sort of clickable seal (Similar to those of TRUSTe, VeriSign?, etc.) that verifies usernames and passwords are processed by google, not the site.

Comment by drnickyoung, Apr 04, 2009

Going round in circles, I cannot find ANY drupal plugin to down load. Can someone point me to it please?

Comment by i...@moreno.co.il, Apr 06, 2009

5.x version will be very usefull!

Comment by jjverdun, Apr 11, 2009

yes, 5.x would be useful indeed :) Thanks

Comment by sulario, May 03, 2009

When I go to enable friend connect in my drupal 6 site, It requires " Unique site identifier provided by Google Friend Connect during initial registration."

Could you guys tell me where to find it?

Thanks

Comment by frank.leitner, May 15, 2009

I back the wish for a 5.x version. Would be fantastic ;)

Comment by sunnyagyes, Jun 03, 2009

how can i be connected

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Comment by boychou.thokchom, Oct 22, 2009

How about bringing this thing to drupal.org. We like our drupal specific things on drupal.org, we trust drupal.org ;}. Thanks.

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