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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