Janrain Engage for Sonny

WordPress 3.3 Sonny, launched earlier this month and we have since released a new version of our Janrain Engage for WordPress plugin including our latest social login widget and some cool new features.

Highlighted new features

• Supports WordPress version 3.3
• Updated with latest Janrain Social Login Widget
• See which Social Providers people are logging in with on your site. This information is included in the Users section of your WordPress Dashboard.
• Added new WordPress shortcodes to easily personalize content that is different for visitors that are and aren’t logged into the site.

Janrain Capture for Magento Extension Released

Now it is even easier to integrate Janrain’s hosted registration into your sites built using the Magento platform. Our latest Janrain Capture for Magento Extension integrates seamlessly with the Janrain Engage plugin (social login and social sharing) we released earlier in 2011.

• Centralized and hosted user profile database
• Integrated with Janrain Engage to sign in with a variety of social identity providers
• Supports single sign-on

Please note that you need to license Janrain Capture to use this extension.

Social Share Button Updates

• Larger icons to increase visibility and social share activity
• Share counters that track and show how many visitors have shared
• Shares are tracked per provider
• Share tracking is shown in an attractive bubble interface
• Total shares shown to encourage visitor sharing

Commenting Updates

• Social avatars on comments
• Links to social profiles on comments
• Social provider badges on comment
• Comments now show a simpler share link to keep site layout

Sidebar Widget – Signed In State Updates

• Sidebar widget now shows the user’s avatar if available
• Option to hide sidebar widget for signed-in connected users

Back-End Updates

• Improved email and username conflict resolution and collection
• Many user-facing strings are editable in the admin UI

Try this new version on: http://wordpress.janraindemo.com/
Download it from: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rpx/

vBulletin

vBulletin customers can now make it quicker and easier for their visitors to register, sign-on, and share by adding Janrain Engage for vBulletin (Beta) to their implementation. The Janrain Engage release has been developed using the attest version of vBulletin and should be compatible with vBulletin 4.x or greater.

Features included in this plug-in:

Site Registration & Login via a Preferred Social Network or Email Provider

Enable sign-in with existing credentials from a social network or email provider such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, SalesForce, Windows Live ID(XBOX, Hotmail, Messenger), Orkut, MySpace, AOL and others (Over 20 Supported Networks).

Social Sharing with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Yahoo!

A customizable widget to share articles to multiple social networks simultaneously. Users can select up to four social communities such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Yahoo for publishing. On average, each user generated post generates 13 clicks back to the site.

We are very excited to announce the beta release of Janrain Engage for vBulletin, and will continue to rollout new features and functionality in the coming months. We’d love to hear your feedback so we can continue to improve the product.

Get it Now: Janrain Engage for vBulletin – Beta

Screenshots of the implementation are below. You may also see a working demo here.

My path to becoming a Drupal developer was born out of necessity.

In my “day job,” I was a best-selling author and newspaper columnist. But at night, I was a tech-savvy entrepreneur. And I wanted to engage my readers with an interactive, community-driven website.

I started out by hiring a development firm to build a custom content management system for me. When their work failed to impress, I briefly considered rolling my own code. Then it hit me: Why spend time reinventing a wheel that countless others had created before me?

That’s when I found Drupal. As an open source platform, Drupal represented a powerful, flexible, and scalable system that could support virtually any type of web application and service I could dream up. With Drupal, instead of worrying about how to manage users, store data, or implement access permissions, I could leverage an ecosystem of well-tested core code and thousands of contributed modules.

As I became immersed in Drupal and its developer community over the last five years, a new question arose: How could I better connect my Drupal websites to the popular social networks and web services that my users were also frequenting?

Once again, I considered rolling my own code: Using existing Drupal modules as a starting point, I figured I could integrate with Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, MySpace, and a few others. But even if I took the time to learn all these different APIs, did I really want to manage and maintain them over time? And as my audience became increasingly global, how would I integrate with other social networks that were popular abroad?

When I discovered Janrain Engage, it seemed like the ideal solution. Instead of having to worry about the minutia of each third party service–including how to authenticate users, map user profile data, and share content–I could let the folks at Janrain handle this. Janrain already had an impressive list of social networks onboard and they had a roadmap to add new ones, too.

Better yet, by combining Janrain Engage with Drupal, I had the best of both worlds: A powerful, flexible, and simple system to build advanced websites and quickly connect them to the greater social web.

After becoming a co-maintainer of Drupal’s Janrain Engage module, I worked hard to expand the module’s feature set so that other Drupal site builders could create advanced authentication and social sharing workflows with no code and just a few clicks. Here are some of the notable features:

Login and Registration

Allow site visitors to quickly register and login with one of their existing accounts at popular third-party websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Yahoo!. Support is included by default for both the Drupal user login page and the Drupal user login block (which appears in a sidebar column on any page).

Data Mapping

With permission of the user, you can map user profile data supplied by Janrain Engage to specific Drupal data fields. Did a user update their real first and last name on Facebook, but didn’t bother to do it on your site? With just a few clicks to configure the data mapping, you can import this data automatically!

But what if a user has authenticated with multiple identity providers, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn? How can you specify which provider profile data gets kept and which data gets overwritten? With our Drupal module, you can simply rank the providers for each field you’re mapping.

Linked Account Management

A “Linked accounts” tab is provided to any end user who is granted the appropriate permission. Using this tab, a user can easily add, remove, or otherwise manage the third-party identity providers connected to his or her Drupal website account.

Social Sharing

Make it easy for users to share their Drupal site contributions and activity with friends and followers on other social networks. A “Share” button or link may be included alongside specific Drupal content types (which triggers the Janrain Engage social sharing widget). Better yet, specific “tokens” can be used to completely customize the default text and links included when users share content (similar to “mail merge” fields).

Event Triggers and Actions

For those also using Drupal’s popular “Rules” module, it’s possible to create sophisticated logic that triggers certain website actions when a user registers or shares content via Janrain Engage.

For instance, let’s say that anytime someone registers with a Facebook account you want to send them a special e-mail message that suggests they invite their friends to join the site? Just pick an event (“Linked account was added”), define a condition (“user has linked a Facebook account”), and implement an action (“send an e-mail”). A couple of minutes later, you’re good to go!

Custom Data Views

What if you want to quickly create an administrative page that shows all of the users on your site who have authenticated using Janrain Engage? Using Drupal’s popular “Views” module and a couple of point-and-click configurations, you can create a custom page that shows all linked accounts on your site and even allows you to filter these results by provider (such as Facebook or Twitter).

Better yet, all of the features I’ve mentioned don’t require writing a single line of code. In fact, even a Drupal site building novice can quickly configure these advanced features–making it now possible to integrate with the larger social web in 10 minutes or less!

It’s been said that “with great power comes great responsibility.” But these days, with the Drupal content management system, the Janrain Engage service, and Drupal’s Janrain Engage module in your web development toolbox, great power comes with even greater simplicity.

Ben Kaplan is a Drupal developer and web technology consultant based in Portland, Oregon. Visit his development blog at www.CrimsonPen.com.

For more information about the Janrain Engage module for Drupal (including a demo website), visit http://drupal.org/project/rpx. 

That’s where Janrain comes in. Starting today, Janrain Engage social login and sharing is available for the Magento eCommerce platform.

The Magento eCommerce platform serves over 90,000 merchants and drives over $25 billion in transactions. Janrain Engage shopping cart extension for Magento supports rapid registration using social identities from Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live, Aol, Twitter and up to 12 others. It also enables users to share purchases and SKUs with their social graph driving qualified referral traffic to the online store. Additionally, users can link multiple social identities to a single Magento account, providing retailers with a 360^o view of their users with minimal effort.

This plugin is available for all levels of Janrain Engage and can be downloaded from the Magento Connect marketplace.

We have put together a sample storefront to showcase the user experience and have provided documentation to help get you started on your installation.

Integrating social into your ecommerce site has never been easier. Please give it a try and let us know what you think.

Screenshots:

The Janrain Engage Module allows Drupal 7 based sites to offer quick sign ups and logins for their users via their social network identities from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo!, LinkedIn and others. Engage also enables social sharing of comments or other activities on the website with users’ friends on multiple social networks. Websites can import a user’s profile picture from their social network for use as their Drupal profile picture.

Drupal 7 based websites have the flexibility of mapping user profiles to either Drupal’s core profile fields or to the more extensible Profile 2 fields. Janrain Engage not only simplifies the process of pre-filling site registration forms with a users’ profile from social networks but also minimizes set up and implementation time associated with profile mapping. Since Engage normalizes all user profile data returned by social networks to the portable contacts format, websites only need to set up the mappings once via the Drupal 7 administrative interface. Website administrators, and more specifically online marketing managers, can easily modify the choice of social networks offered for the purposes of signing into the site without needing to reconfigure the mappings.

Screen shot below shows the initial configuration of profile mappings via the Drupal administrative interface.

Configuration of social networks used for signing in shown below.

To see this Engage for Drupal 7 in action and experience the sign-in and social sharing experience from the perspective of your website users, click here. Please let us know what you think.

We will continually be adding new information to this site, so please check back often. If you don’t find what you are looking for, we encourage you to contact us. Our team is always excited to dive in to learn more about your business and suggest ways that we can socialize your site and help take your organization to the next level.

Here is a list of what you will find in our Resources Section:

For Marketers

• Videos: Find product demos, example screencasts and interviews.
• Case Studies: Read about how organizations have benefited from Janrain’s solutions.
• White Papers: Best practices and recommended strategies for your site.
• Datasheets: Full list of benefits and product specs for each Janrain product.
• Webinars: Register for upcoming webinars and view a list of events.
• Newsletter: Sign up to receive regular news on product updates and Janrain happenings.

For Developers

• Technical Videos: Learn more about the flow and technical details of our products.
• Developers Forum: A forum for product announcements and support from the community.
• Janrain Engage Documentation: Integration and API information.
• Plugins & Connectors: Complete list of supported plugins.
• Product Feedback & Feature Requests: Let us know what you’d like us to work on.
• Profile Data By Social Network: Complete list of profile data that Janrain is able to collect.
• Technical Support: Have a specific question? Ask our community board or submit a ticket (Pro/Plus accounts only).

Registration & Login via a Preferred Social Network or Email Provider

Give your visitors the option to sign-in to your site with their existing credentials from a social network or email provider such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Windows Live, MySpace, AOL and others (16 Supported Networks).

Optional Displays

• Janrain Engage block on the standard WordPress registration and login screen
• Janrain Engage block next to login prompt for comments
• Janrain Engage block displayed anywhere within your specified widget area

Collects Email Addresses

Prompts users to enter an email address if the provider used for login does not pass a verified email address (WordPress Requirement).

Legacy Account Mapping

If your user has an existing account with your site, Janrain Engage will map profile data received at login with the existing account (via verified email only).

Social Sharing

A customizable widget to share articles to multiple social networks simultaneously. Users can select up to four social communities such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Yahoo for publishing. On average, each postis will generate nine referral clicks back to your site for each post.

To see this plugin in action, click here.

We are very excited to announce this new Janrain Engage WordPress Plugin and will continue to rollout new features and functionality in the coming months. We’d love to hear your feedback so we can continue to improve upon our product.

The plug-in can be easily installed on a WordPress site or blog in minutes with no coding required.  Check it out the Janrain Engage WordPress Plugin and let us know what you think.