This guest post was written by Arunoda Susiripala, who is an undergraduate student at the University of Kelaniya in Sri Lanka. He stepped into web development 2 years ago and developed the JConnect Integration Engine as part of the Google Summer of Code 2009. In his spare time, he enjoys playing rugby and watching comedies. - Ed.

Google Friend Connect provides a novel way to integrate social features onto any web page and is great for interacting with people from around the web. One of my favorite features is its ability to allow people to log in to websites with existing accounts.

That's why I decided to look into integrating Google Friend Connect with Elgg. Elgg is the best open source social networking platform available, but it's users have difficulty with attracting people to their Elgg sites/communities and getting them to register. So they often also try to provide people with some other means to login, whether it was OpenID, Facebook, or something else.

Once I learned about Friend Connect, I knew it could do more than the other options because it allowed people to log in to sites with accounts from many different services, such as Google, Yahoo, AOL, and OpenID. So I started to develop a plugin to integrate the backend of Elgg with Friend Connect so that people could log in with these accounts. It worked really well and I was able to get it to pass the user's name and image from Friend Connect to Elgg. I also integrated the Friend Connect social bar with the plugin so users can easily enable or disable it.

The integration with Friend Connect was very easy compared to the integration of other services and only required a minimal amount of work. The three steps I took to integrate Elgg with Friend Connect were:

1. Use the JavaScript API to let people log in with Friend Connect
2. Use the cookie stored by Friend Connect to get information using the REST API
3. Then do the Elgg logic with the obtained information

This Elgg plugin is in its alpha state and needs further improvement. I also plan to add more features and more gadgets. So go try it out on the demo site and let me know what you think. I hope this plugin will help to make the web more social.

Posted by Arunoda Susiripala, Web Developer