It’s a sad day. Well, it was a few days ago when I found out that the best WordPress Authentication Plugin (IMHO), Clef, was calling it quits.

I received an email from Jesse Pollak over at Clef:

I’m writing to inform you that starting today, we’ll be sunsetting the Clef product with a final shutdown date of 6/6 (official blog post here). Everything will remain fully functional and maintained until that date, at which point the mobile apps will cease functioning and be removed from the Google Play and Apple App stores.

We’ve explored every option to keep the Clef product alive and are deeply sorry for any inconvenience this transition will cause.

Needless to say, after using the plugin on all of my sites for over 2 years now, I was quite upset. Nothing comes close to the ease of use of this amazing plugin.

If you have never used Clef, I will explain how simple it was to use: In WordPress, when you go to log in, you normally get a login screen with fields for your username and password. If you had some other 2 step authentication app, after entering your username and password, you might be presented with a field for a code you get via either a SMS text or via another phone app. Clef wasn’t like that. Instead of a normal login page, you were presented with a moving bar code.

You would then open the Clef app on your smartphone and scan the barcode. This would automatically log you in. No need to type your username and password, which was great as it protected against key loggers. The best part was it was one step. Scan. That’s it.

Sadly now they are asking people who use Clef to migrate off of their app and on to some other tyoe of 2 step authentication. I show Authy, although Google Auth is another good choice. But none of the choices currently out there are as awesome as Clef has been.