Ghost & Membership + commenting system auto log-in?

Developer help
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Hello! There’s the new Ghost version with built-in membership, and on Ghost: Independent technology for modern publishing, and in the sample screenshots:

  • …
  • Members-only comments

What could be good ways to integrate a commenting system, with Ghost’s built-in membership functionality? So that there’d be Single Sign-On or “auto login”: If you’re logged in to the Ghost blog, with your membership, then you’d automatically be logged in to the commenting system too.

How could that be made to work?

(There seems to be more webhooks now?: Ghost Webhooks , I think this one is new for example: member.added. By listening to such a webhook, it could be possible to keep a commenting system’s database in sync with Ghost membership database. However that’s not the same thing as auto-log-in from Ghost to a commenting system. )

Some blogs will have both “real members” who want to post comments via their Ghost membership accounts — and there’ll also be causal one-time visitors, maybe from a news aggregator, who prefer not creating a real membership account, but just want to quickly post a comment via a quick OAuth Gmail/Facebook/etc login. Then, this isn’t about Single Sign-On — instead, the visitor could choose to login and post a comment via his/her Ghost membership account (if any), or Gmail / Facebook etc.

(Background: I’m developing a commenting system, Talkyard, and someone asked about automatic login for the blog visitors, via their Ghost membership (those who have one).)

Edit: Ghost doesn’t support something like OpenID Connect?

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I just want to express my support. It would be nice if users didn’t have to have two separate accounts: one for Ghost membership, one for commenting.

/ Martin

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I have been building this over the past few weeks: cove.chat

I would love to hear what you think! @dybber @KajMagnus

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Try to use comments on cove.chat blog - Loading… after auth and nothing

2020-04-30 (2)
2020-04-30 (2)935×680 32.2 KB

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Thanks for trying it out @f.ponomarev!
I’ve now disabled comments on the Cove blog as I don’t want it to become a testing ground.
I’ll have a demo site running soon for this kind of testing.

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Hello @dan, I just had a look at https://cove.chat, and I came to wonder, how does the integration work, technically?

Here: Sync member names from Ghost :

Cove [can] sync member names from Ghost to Cove … the name that’s currently in Ghost will be synced to Cove when the user next makes a comment

Does that mean that if one posts a comment, Cove will automatically include the name and email inserted by the Ghost template?

Is this data signed with a private key and HMAC or sth like that? (or how can Cove know the data hasn’t been tampered with, e.g. someone making a custom HTTP request and specifying another person’s name and email, to impersonate that other person)

***

I came to think about this, now, because someone emailed me (hello Bastien? :-)) and asked if Talkyard supports Ghost membership comments, and it doesn’t. And he mentioned Cove.chat, so I came to think about this old thread here in this forum. (Sorry for the late reply — I was short of time and didn’t check out Cove.chat directly, back at the time, and then I forgot about it.)

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