Through my work in Second Life, it seems that I’m increasingly working on SL-centric WordPress-based websites. WordPress:MU is capable of running multiple sites from the same install, and with the multi-site manager plugin, it’s capable of running multiple sites on different domains.
What is the purpose of MN:SL ?
Since I seem to be developing SL-centric community based websites more often these days, it seemed a bit odd to force users of each of those sites to have a seperate login. The purpose of MN:SL is to allow a single-sign-on for all the sites on the network.
The Alternative Solution
The alternative solution was to further modify the OpenID login plugin and force users of the SL-centric sites to create an account on SLOpenID prior to accessing the seperate site. I never felt comfortable with the idea of doing this, as it goes against the whole idea behind OpenID.
In the case of SLBirthday.info, I felt especially uncomfortable- to the point of it being an ethical issue- with the idea of applying the filtered OpenID logins idea to a site that I run whose concept isn’t “mine”.
Sites on MN:SL
SLOpenID
SLOpenID was already running on WP:MU prior to it’s migration to MN:SL, so it was fairly trivial to integrate into the network.
SL Birthday
I have mentioned migrating SLBirthday.info to various people on the “committee”, and I’m currently trying to organise a meeting between SLOpenID users, SL Birthday Exhibitors/Staff & Linden Lab’s attaché to the SL Birthday event to discuss whether or not the site should be migrated.
The reason I haven’t gone ahead and migrated it anyway is similar to why I didn’t use filtered OpenID logins on the SLBirthday.info website- the concept of “SL Birthday Events” isn’t mine, and it would be rather arogant of me to take control of the concept to that degree without holding the idea up to public discussion.