Benefits of authentication via social networks at your site

Benefits of authentication via social networks at your site

By Eugene Sivokon Monday, 20 October 2014

So, registration at any site was quite an unpleasant procedure during recent years. Just imagine: you had to verify the username, input an e-mail, confirm it, input the password and keep these login data somewhere, then input Captcha and await e-mail arrival for confirmation. That’s minimum. In some cases you had to select avatar, birthday, etc. Too many actions for simple registration, isn’t it?

Nowadays a new trend has appeared: websites optionally offer a great add-on and a visitor may log at the website with standard module or log in using social network profile. You just click on Social icon and get a pop up window requesting usage of personal data from your network account. After confirming the data has been transferred to the website and you’re already logged-in in two clicks! That will save your time incredibly and as a result - high users loyalty.

How can we integrate social network authentication to Joomla? Let me introduce SLogin extension. It has been created by JoomLine club and now covers a lot of networks and sites SLogin may be integrated with. Here are the social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, Google+1, VK, Odnoklassniki. And following sites: Instagram, WordPress, Yahoo, live.com, Yandex, Ulogin and mail.ru.

The component creates profiles using OAuth authorization and takes all necessary data from selected social profile, as a result a user may choose which network is preferable to be assigned with, also it’s possible to merge multiple social accounts within the profile. The most “tasteful feature” is avatars support. Once you logged in, the avatars can be taken and being used within site in 3rd party extensions.

The component is developed on modular basis and can be easily extended to work with any Joomla extension through plugin. Now there are following famous components which are supported with free plugins: JComments, Seblod, Easyblog and Community Builder.

And there are commercial plugins for following components: JoomShopping, K2, JomSocial, Kunena. There is also a plugin allowing to make social cross posting.

Нereby SLogin can be easily integrated with lots of popular extensions and it’s useful to mention that Kunena and JComments are supported too (read tutorial How to make social authorization with Kunena and JComments).

We’re going to support SLogin as a default feature in our further Kunena templates.

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Eugene Sivokon

Executive manager, web developer, and Joomla enthusiast. He has been a part of and worked in many of the major web development roles over his 11 years, taking on various projects. Personal site: eugenesivokon.com

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