blogtaku42

Update 2009-10-22 - Plugin unmaintained
The plugin has not received any updates for a long time, due to a lack of time. I’m about to switch to another blogging system and thus soon won’t be using WordPress myself. Thus I’ve decided to officially stop the development of the plugin. If anyone is interested to continue its development, please feel free to contact me.

Purpose
This WordPress plugin allows you to easily select a Creative Commons license, which then will be used to mark your work accordingly. In case you don’t know about the purpose of Creative Commons, you really should see this ass-rockin’ animation.

The plugin is capable of adding information about the license you’ve selected in several ways: as metadata (RDF, usually used in the header of HTML files), as textual link or as a “clickable image”. Depending on configuration this either happens automatically or via template tags. Further documentation about the available template tags can be found in the configuration menu for the plugin.

The code for o42-CC is based on the WP-CC plugin, written by Firas Durri. I started by writing a small modification to WP-CC which allowed to select one of the available jurisdictions. But the mod didn’t know about the different versions available in each jurisdiction, and it didn’t know which of the licenses are available in which version. Being unsatisfied with this situation I started to rewrite much of the WP-CC code and ended up with o42-CC.
Firas has been (and still is) a great help during development, by contributing some ideas and testing the plugin.

Knowing that, you might ask yourself how o42-CC and WP-CC differ from each other. Which brings us to the…

Features

• o42-CC starts off with a wizard which supports the selection of a jurisdiction. This makes sure that users doesn’t accidentally select invalid combinations of jurisdiction, license and license version.
• Each of the configuration screens offer a short help text as a guide through the setup procedure.
• o42-CC allows to select any of the currently available license version, not just 2.0 licenses - a feature that has been requested for WP-CC some time ago.
• Information about available licenses are separated from the main code and are held in a few arrays. This makes it easy to update or extend these informations without the need of modifying the main code.
• License selection can safely be aborted. The current settings in database won’t be changed until the “Update Options” button is pressed in step 2 of the license selection wizard.

While the Creative Commons website offers the so called satelite licensing interface for applications like this plugin, I decided to take another road and implement the necessary logic in the plugin. The main reason for this decision was that the satelite interface didn’t allow to select old versions of licenses. This would be ok for users who haven’t selected a license yet, but would be annoying for those who have already adopted an old license version before.

Disadvantages
When speaking of the features it’s only fair to mention the disadvantages I see. They might or might not apply to your situation, though.

• Since all information about the licenses are hardcoded, a new plugin version is needed to make use of changes to these informations. On the other hand, such changes are rare. You also must actively switch to a new version of the selected license (since license upgrades do not apply automatically!), so this is not a big issue, I think.
• In contrast to WP-CC this plugin doesn’t provide links to further information of each of the offered licenses. Users which did not already choose one of the licenses will find it hard to decide which of them is the right one for their needs. It’s not easy to address this problem, but addressing it is on the to-do-list (see below)
• Localization isn’t easily possible (without editing the source) in the current version (0.1.1). Although this “only” applies to the configuration screens in the administration interface, this will be addressed soon.

Screenshots
Wizard - welcome message
Wizard - selection of jurisdiction
Wizard - selection of license and version
Configuration screen for selected license

License
This plugin is available under Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Germany.

Download
Current version is: 0.1.1

o42-cc-0.1.1.tar.gz

Installation

1. Download the current version of the plugin (see above).
2. Extract the archive to a temporary directory.
3. Copy the file o42-cc.php to wp-content/plugins/ in your WordPress installation.
4. Change to the Plugins menu in the WordPress administration panel, where o42-CC should be listed as an available plugin. Activate it.
5. Change to menu Options → o42-CC. The license selection wizard will be presented to guide you through the process of selecting a license for your blog. Follow the instructions on the screen.
6. Decide about the options offered regarding automatic output of information about the selected license in your blog.
7. Optional: in case the automatic output doesn’t work well for your template, you might want to place a call to one or more of the offered template tags manually into your template. The configuration screen that’s visible when a license has been selected has a short description about each of the tags.

To-Do / Feature ideas

• Make use of the localisation features offered by WordPress. Offer a german localisation.
• Offer a dynamic, javascript-based info link during license selection (step 2 of the wizard). Basic idea: the link should guide the user to the description depending on the previously selected jurisdiction and the currently “highlighted” version for each of the offered licenses.
• Add option to the configuration screen to allow selection of one of the two standard “Creative Commons - some rights reserved” logos. Maybe extended by a field to manually specify a completely different graphics file as standard image. The user may still override that standard selection by providing an individual image to the call of o42_cc_output_image() template tag.
• Add a text field to change the default text used by o42_cc_output_text(). User still may override this standard by providing a different text when calling …_output_text.
• Provide per-post selection of a license.
• Add Public Domain.
• Add CC/GPL and CC/LGPL.
• Add other, non-CC licenses. Suggestions are welcome.
• Provide a way to cleanly uninstall the plugin. This should remove all of the options that were added to the database by the plugin. See if there is a callback that could be used to do so when the plugin is deactivated. If not already available, propose integration of a framework for plugin deinstallation, could be added to WP 1.6.
• Separate license information from code and add a mini-wizard to check for and perform upgrades to this file. Thanks to Bill for this suggestion.

Changes
Version 0.1.1:
First public release.