Creative Commons Releases New WordPress Plugin for Attributing Content with Gutenberg Blocks

Creative Commons has released an official WordPress plugin for attributing and licensing content. It is an updated and revamped version of the organization’s WPLicense plugin. It is also loosely based on an old plugin called License, which seems to have been abandoned after not receiving any updates for six years.

The new Creative Commons plugin is an attribution tool that is compatible with the block editor. It comes with eight different blocks for licensing any post, page, image, or other type of media.

The block settings allow the user to specify the Attribution text, add additional text after the license, and customize the block’s background and text colors.

The plugin also retains several features from the older versions, including the ability to set a default license and display it as a widget or in the footer. Users can license their entire sites or license some posts, pages, or images differently on a per-content basis using the CC Gutenberg blocks. It is also multisite compatible, where network admins can license the entire network with a default license or allow site admins to choose their own. License information can be displayed with “One Click Attribution” for images.

Software developer Ahmad Bilal worked on the Creative Commons plugin with help from a mentor as part of his Google Summer of Code project. This update is long overdue, as the older version of the plugin was not compatible with newer versions of WordPress beyond 3.8.1. The new plugin is compatible with the latest version of WordPress (5.2.2) and is now available in the official plugin directory.