Ahmad Bilal

Introducing Creative Commons WordPress Plugin

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Ahmad Bilal
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5 min read

WordPress is one of the top platforms for creators on the internet who both produce and consume CC-licensed content. We wanted to integrate with it as seamlessly as possible to promote the use of CC licenses. Keeping that in mind, we worked on a project to create a WordPress plugin in Google Summer of Code 2019 which is now live.

This plugin is an attribution tool. It has multiple features that allow users to attribute their content by including a Creative Commons license (Choose a License) on their WordPress website.

In many cases, WordPress blog/site owners need to specify to their users about what they can share and how. The official WordPress.com docs here elaborate on a manual attribution for this purpose. But now this plugin makes it fairly simple to attribute content, page, post or the whole site/network with a specific CC license.

Under the guidance of my mentors Timid Robot, Hugo Solar and Kriti Godey, I, Ahmad Bilal worked on this project. We released it on the WordPress plugin marketplace in August and a number of people are using it already.

For starters, you install it from the WordPress.org plugin marketplace. Here is a detailed rundown of the features added to our plugin.

Setting a Default Site License

The plugin allows a default site-wide license to avoid any confusion regarding the attribution of the content. After activating the plugin, head to Settings > Creative Commons to set up the default license.

Plugin Settings

Selecting a license is simple. Select one from the given CC licenses, by default CC BY-SA license is used.

Select License

There are multiple options available for the license. You can add:

  • Additional attribution text for a custom note.
  • Title and Title URL. If not mentioned it defaults to “the content”.
  • Author and Author URL. If not mentioned it defaults to “on this site”.
  • Display options.

License Options

Widget

There are two options to display this default license, as a widget or in the footer. We recommend using the widget for better theme compatibility.

Widget

After selecting the widget go to Appearance > Widgets and drag the CC License Widget to the required area. The widget will then display the default license on all pages of the site.

Widget Front-end

Gutenberg Blocks

The plugin adds specific Gutenberg blocks for each Creative Commons license. If you are using the default Gutenberg editor, you will find these blocks under a seperate category.

Blocks Category

These blocks can be used to license any page/post/image or other media.

Blocks Back-end

Following is an image attributed using CC gutenberg block.

Attributed Image

At a glance, with WP CC Plugin you can:

  • License your site with a default license.
  • You can display the default license in the footer or as a widget in widget areas.
  • Display license for the site, posts and pages license)
  • License your WordPress Network (WordPress Multisite install)
  • License some of your sites differently in your WordPress Network
  • License some posts, pages, or images differently from your default license (per content license)
  • License posts and pages by simply including CC Gutenberg blocks for each license required (Gutenberg License Blocks)

If you’re interested in the code, you can check out the plugin repository on GitHub.