Last Friday, on the freeculture.org mailing list, Lawrence Lessig (one of the foremost intellectuals of the Free Culture movement and arguably its primary legal scholar) responded to a comment about WordPress’ radicalness with,
of course, if it integrated CC licenses the way MT does, that would make it even better ….
Like many WP users, seeing it compared unfavourably with Movable Type raises my hackles. So I responded,
I’m not sure what integrating CC licenses would mean… all MT does it put in a bit of metadata that you can copy/paste into your WP template after going through the creativecommons.org wizard. It’s really pretty trivial.
In any case, I suppose I can make a WP plugin that lets you select a license and gives you a template-type tag that MT does. Still don’t see the point, though.
Et voila, I went and wrote 700 lines of php to save a minute or two of pasting here and there: behold WP-CC.
Actually, my site hadn’t been ‘properly’ marked either (ie. with RDF), not because it was hard to do but because I couldn’t couldn’t be bothered. Now that it is, WP-CC has come in use already.
(A few hours before I was done, Chris Davis—who made the excellent visual theme my website currently uses—pointed out that he had made a Per Post Copyright hack last May. Oops. However, WP-CC is not a hack, it’s a proper plugin. And per-post copyrights are on the roadmap. WP-CC is geared towards both simplicity of use and hardcore robustness. This will become obvious a couple releases down the road.)
Talking to masquerade (Robert Deaton) and Carthik Sharma in IRC led me to make a real admin menu interface (thanks for your help, guys!), so I figured I’d go the whole way and package it properly before even the first release, documentation and all.
I must emphasise that this is the first release, version 0.1—this plugin has a long way to go. By the time it’s 0.5, WP will have much more powerful, flexible and carefully implemented CC support than any publishing platform out there. It’s a dare—try us.
There are something things I can already think of for 0.2. Better integration with external tools (cclicense looks good). More specificity, in terms of (a) more precision in specifying author and work metadata and using the full range of multijurisdictional licenses and (b) more flexibility–such things as setting licenses for parts of your site, snippets of text or certain images. And I’ll be putting some thought into the architecture, perhaps even making tester classes. Not until after few weeks though.
Kazi Ferdous made WP-CC a nice header image (thanks!) and here we go: Download WP-CC 0.1. Get it while it’s hot!
Sidenote: this is my first code release ever. Rock on.
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Gennaio 24, 2005 on 3:01 am | In software | No Comments Firasd has made a CC plugin for wordpress, that let the user choice a CC license for his posts. You can read more and download it on: http://firasd.org/studio/wp/wp-cc/ http://www.firasd.org/weblog/2005/01/10/introducing-wp-cc and http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/002386.shtml
Gennaio 24, 2005 on 3:01 am | In software | No Comments Firasd has made a CC plugin for wordpress, that let the user choice a CC license for his posts. You can read more and download it on: http://firasd.org/studio/wp/wp-cc/ http://www.firasd.org/weblog/2005/01/10/introducing-wp-cc and http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/002386.shtml
Firas Durr gives the world a Creative Commons plugin for WordPress. Rock on.
Creative Commons plugin for WordPress. Rock on.
firasd.org » Introducing WP-CC Vou instalar aqui.
firasd.org » Introducing WP-CC Vou instalar aqui.
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[IMG source] WordPress CC. Firas has created a Creative Commons plugin for WordPress, perhaps the most popular open source blog software. Now you can add a CC license to your WordPress blog with just a few clicks. [Creative Commons Blog - rss]
WordPress CC. Firas has created a Creative Commons plugin for WordPress, perhaps the most popular open source blog software. Now you can add a CC license to your WordPress blog with just a few clicks. [Creative Commons Blog - rss]
Firas took up Lawrence Lessig’s bait and whipped up WP-CC, a plugin for making it easy to use CC licenses for you WordPress posts. It looks neat, with it’s own plugin management page, and is, overall, an admirable piece of work for a first-plugin. In fact this is the first time Firas
plugin per le creative-commons per WordPress. In sostanza questo plugin marca con la licenza il vostro blog, evitandovi di dover inserire voi nel template il codice html che vi viene fornito insieme alla licenza…
http://www.firasd.org/weblog/2005/01/10/introducing-wp-cc and http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/002386.shtml
Cool!
Though, I agree that the need is limited. Once it’s “done”, getting it into the official WordPress releases might be a good idea, however. As, Lessig pointed out, the point is to make it idiot friendly (my word, not his). 
Oh no! It’s him again . . .
Just out of curiosity, what other licenses are you considering?
Yeah, I hadn’t really seen the need but I’ve grown to like the plugin, it’s an interesting experiment with metadata if nothing else.
I’m a bit uncomfortable with the GPL, so I may consider a BSD-type license. The reason I said I may switch is that I haven’t exactly given too much thought to the options—just chose the GPL by default.
Excellent work
I’m going to give this a try as soon as I get home from work!
Firas says “…an interesting experiment with metadata” and hoofuckingray for that. The “when” question about the Semantic Web and RDF-type metadata in general will be answered by generaliz(s)ing from such work. Sean Palmer did a little thing a few years back at http://www.uwimp.com that is a very preliminary stab at making most (all?) authoring more aware of the need to index as you create and this new thingie is further evidence that we can indeed get closer to making access’ enhancement more quickly lead to truly Ambient Information.
Love.
Hi Firas, thanks for creating this, now noted on the CC weblog. For future versions you might want to take a look at our partner interface or web services. These will always make available the latest set of licenses, including those ported to other jurisdictions.
One other tiny comment: In the example text you say “All content is by Bridget Jones …”. It might be better to say in the example “All content by Bridget Jones …” (remove the is) as it is pretty common for bloggers to include content they didn’t create.
Great job, and congrats on your first code release!
Installed on my testblog 1.5 beta 1 (11.1.2005), but in the admin ui, wp-admin/admin.php?page=wp-cc.php :
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare cc_output_metadata() in /myfolder/wp-content/plugins/wp-cc.php on line 42
Stedi: Looks like the script failed to die after loading the Config page. Did the Config page finish loading and is it usable (ie. does it process your option changes?)
Got this error:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: is_plugin_page() in /{root directory of my html files}/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wp-cc.php on line 16
Which version of WP is this for? I’m on 1.2.1. It looks like you are using 1.5 beta, so maybe that is the problem?
George: yeah, definitely. I should make it clearer on the download page, but it’s not for 1.2.x.
This is very exciting. I can’t wait for the WP 1.5 release and give it a go. Thanks so much!
Why are you uncomfortable with the GNU GPL?
Also, I thought I read somewhere that the plugin is for Windows,
but could not find that again. Is it platform-independent?
Hey Firas, do you think that you could bill this as a project of “Free Culture Labs”? Downhill Battle has a “Lab”, and we’d like to start developing software to support free culture as well. We already have another software project in the planning stages, an open-source cross-platform collaborative editor (or SubEthaEdit replacement) called CoEd. http://software.thecrypto.org/coed/
I think that students developing open source software could potentially be a powerful force
Nicholas: ah, I’m not wary of the GPL, I was just saying that I wanted to consider my options. However, by now it seems that GPL is the best way to ‘protect my investment’, so to speak (ie. to make sure that derived code is always available to the community.)
About platform-compatibility: WP-CC is only dependent on WordPress; WP in turn is only dependent on PHP and MySQL. Any other aspects of the platform (operating system, etc.) don’t matter.
Nelson: Sounds pretty good to me! But the question in my mind is, ‘what does WP-CC gain by coming under the freeculture.org banner?’ Hmm.
PS. Actually, I’m warming to the idea, maybe being part of FC.o can help get WP-CC localized with translation files?
Yes, it’s quite likely, we have some international people on the mailing list. Mention that you need help with localization on the Discuss list.
That last comment was me, and I think that working with FreeCulture.org could be mutually beneficial. Mostly, don’t you want to help out the student movement by getting our name out there? It’s only fair, WP-CC would never have happened if both you and Lessig weren’t on our mailing list
Also, this could be the beginning of a wave of student-built open source projects! How cool would it be to have hundreds of students developing free software? Help us get FC Labs started and maybe people will want to get involved with it and make awesome tools like WP-CC
I’m won over by the idea—can I call it a freeculture.org project? (are you sure FC Labs is the term we’d end up using? kinda tacky to clone Downhill Battle)—but I hope you realize that WP-CC is *just a script*. It is not mind-blowing code.
Seems something’s wrong with wp-plugin-mgr and wp-cc: wp-cc is properly detected but displays as if it needed an update.
Denis: it does. I released a new version a couple days ago.
Any chance of a version for 1.22? I dont feel like installing 1.5 until it’s a non beta.
Tom: No, sorry. I want WP-CC to be very well made and the functions I need to hook into just aren’t available in 1.2
It’s OK that it’s just a little plugin, a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step… or something cliched like that
You’re right, cloning Downhill Battle is a little boring, but hey, they didn’t patent the idea, did they?
I’ll bring up the question of what to call it on our next conference call.
Which is today (Sunday 2005-01-16) at 3pm EST, if you’re interested. E-mail me if you’ve forgotten the phone # or access code.
Hmm…like Stedi above, I have the same problem:
“Fatal error: Cannot redeclare cc_output_metadata() in /home2/georgeal/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-cc.php on line 47″
The admin interface doesn’t even show up… Perhaps I did something wrong?
Allen: What version of WP, and what version of WP-CC?
WordPress 2005-01-15 from SVN.
I pulled the latest copy of your plugin from SVN as well.
If I use version 0.1.1 of your plugin, then I get the following error:
“Fatal error: Cannot redeclare cc_output_metadata() in /home2/georgeal/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-cc.php on line 42″
The only difference is line #.
Allen: Ok, I entered a ticket about this.
I can think of a workaround, but that would mean making people upload more than one file to install, which I’m trying to avoid for as long as possible.
In any case, this’ll block the v0.2 release until fixed. If I can’t reproduce it, can I email you to check possible fixed versions?
Hi,
No problem! I’d be glad to help you out in any way
I’m a little disappointed that it will only run on 1.5.
After all, MOST WP users aren’t bleeding edge, and Mingus (1.2.2) is the current stable release.
I suppose I’ll just have to wait for an official 1.5 release before I can use this effectively.
Jason: hmm. I guess I might backport it.
I’m just a bit wary of supporting two different sets of code..
Just installed the recently released 1.5 and I am getting this error:
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare cc_output_metadata() (previously declared in /usr/sites/floggin.us/root/www/wp-content/plugins/wp-cc.php:42) in /usr/sites/floggin.us/root/www/wp-content/plugins/wp-cc.php on line 60
By looking at the comments, it seems common. I looked at the source and I cant figure out why this error would appear (I am not a PHP person but I used to code in it). The error line (line 60) is just the ending } for the cc_output_metadata() function. Line 42 is where the function is first declared.
Eric: I fixed that a while ago.. I’ll do another release soon.
oh, sorry, didn’t know. *cry*
Firas,
Installed your plug-in (I believe correctly) and the WP-CC menu item shows up in Options however when I click it I get a blank page. I’ve checked permissions on both files (they are 0644). Not sure what else to try.
Thanks.
Mark: I think it’s the same issue. I guess I’ll do another release tomorrow with just this fixed.
Ok, I released 1.1.2 (get it here). The options page bug is fixed in that version.
Let me know of any issues.
Just installed this new version. Seems to be working. Much thanks for the update and great plugin! =]
Hello, I’ve translated your plugin in Italian, and want to make it available. How can I do? Can I create a download page for the Italian version on my blog?
Federico, that’s great! Yeah, you can put it on your blog and send me a link or email me the file and I’ll host it. There’s a Spanish version that I’m going to be putting up today as well.
Would it be possible to update the plugin to support the new 2.5 CC Liscense? I tried myself but broke the plugin…
Yes. It would be wonderful if the plugin could support the 2.5 version Licenses, but even better if you could have it support any version of the license. Like Steven in comment #57, I tried myself but broke the plugin.