User authentication widget/plugins for a custom web game

I have a custom web game I am developing and I'd like to offload the user authentication bits to a widget or some software I can leverage. As can be seen from: Best practices for web login / authentication? There are thoughts on what a good authentication system requires, not the least of whic开发者_Go百科h are lost passwords, captchas, email - none of which I want to redesign from the ground up.

So what software should I be using? I realize I could put a Wordpress/Joomla!/Drupal front-end on the site which would give me other benefits like user forums - but would that play nicely with "handing off" the user to my game system?

Of course my game has a database where user accounts are tied to unique character names - think RPG.

Thanks for any tips.

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There's basically two ways to do this. The first is hooking up with Wordpress/Joomla!/Drupal/Simple Machine Forums/PHPBB/etc. This has the benefit of allowing your users to post on the forums while using the same account to play the game, which should lower the barrier to posting on the forums. Provided that the API for the base system is designed around it, and your own game is designed around it, it will definitely play nicely with handing off the user to the game. The latter is easily done by linking your game character table with the Wordpress/etc user table.

The other option is to use OpenID. This might actually be even better for the users, since they don't even have to create an account at your site (and they won't have to remember any new passwords, either). It'll also play nice with handing the user to your game system (in fact, it's designed to do exactly that). The only hard part is that implementing OpenID can be tricky sometimes, depending on the language and the existence (or lack thereof) of a good library.