Related to the work I was doing on calculatorbot, I just put together an application stub that implements login through twitter. It works great!
The process goes something like:
- user clicks a link on your site to login
- user is taken to twitter for login, if they are already logged in proceed to the next step
- user is asked to allow your application access, they accept or deny (only happens once)
- user is taken back to your site, where your site can ask twitter for information about the user (name, screen name, etc) and create a user-profile based on that.
Some helpful links I found:
First, a document on twitter’s site that describes their API and gives a technical overview of the login process.
Second, a document that provides php source code that you can test and read to learn about how to implement OAuth/Twitter login. Example in Php: using Twitter’s OAuth