Social Media Login Thoughts

David and I recently modified our login approach to be handled on the side of the server. This is necessary we believe as client side authentication just doesn't mean anything. In some cases that may be okay if the authentication was desired for superficial reasons, but we needed a stronger form of auth to handle our commenting system. 

Initially we researched and implemented a plug-in (with associated api) called SecureSocial. This plug-in made a lot of things very easy, and after awhile we had authentication through google accounts working well. This had to be done working in conjunction with the google developer console for registering client-ids.

There was an opportunity to use other social networking sites as well for authentication such as Twitter and Facebook, but the barrier to entry for developers was higher for these sites (and lets be honest, twitter just isn't a necessary feature for a DIY car diagnostic assistance tool).

SecureSocial is no longer how we go about the authentication for our app, but the knowledge gained by working through their documentation as well as their api enabled us to move forward with the processes that eventually became the permanent solutions.