CUNY Academic Commons

I've installed the Creative Commons official plugin onto cdev for testing.

When in the Plugins panel, the plugin is called "Creative Commons". Once activated, you can navigate to the "Settings > Creative Commons" page to change the license.

Some issues:

1. The UX for the license chooser is a little finicky

When you click on the "Change license" button, this opens up a modal with a brief questionnaire that will guide you in selecting an appropriate license.

Confirming the license is the finicky part. I've recorded a GIF to explain what I mean:

In order for your chosen license to show up, you need to click on the "Proceed" text link, which then closes the modal and displays the updated license. If you do not click on "Proceed", the chosen license does not take effect.

If we wanted to get rid of this "Proceed" step, upstream changes are needed to the creativecommons.org/choose/ web app. An alternative would be to create our own questionnaire via JS, which wouldn't require any upstream dependencies.

2. License shows up in the site footer poorly

If you enabled "Allow a different license per post/page" on the main settings page, you can set a separate license for each post. I expected the license for individual posts to show up at the end of the post content, but it did not.

It currently shows up out-of-place in the footer with the logo on one line and the license on another line:

This needs to be changed so the license is displayed after the post content. This block should also be customizable via template overrides.

Also, if you are not on a post page, the site license, by default, shows up in the same footer location. I will probably remove the license from the footer as the widget should be sufficient enough.

3. Widget works, but has no options

The widget doesn't offer any display options. Instead, it pulls existing options from the main settings page. This might not be a big deal, but I note it anyway.

This is what it looks like:

A note for Boone, I haven't committed the plugin to 1.14.x yet because I had to fork the plugin in order to fix the license chooser. I've already submitted a pull request and noted the various concerns I mentioned above on their Github repo.

There are a lot of good ideas in this plugin, but the actual implementation can be better. It also hasn't seen much development in the last couple of years. I am very tempted to write my own version of the plugin.

A quick update on my end, I started writing my own version of the Creative Commons widget.

Here's a GIF of the license chooser in action:

It's almost a complete copy of the current interface at https://creativecommons.org/choose/. Let me know what you think.

You'll also be able to use the chooser for selecting individual post licenses if we want to turn on that ability. About integrating the chooser into other parts of the Commons like group and blog creation, that is also possible. Group creation would probably be easier at the moment as blog creation is tied to the new Site Templates functionality.

Should have a preliminary version up on cdev by end of the week.

I do like the introductory explanatory text in the CC widget though, since many folks aren't familiar with CC licenses. Can we add in that text (or adapt that text to include)?

I was thinking about this myself, Maura! I've added the introductory text as well as some descriptions for each question.

View the following GIF:
https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/attachments/9039/license-chooser-new2.gif

Might benefit from some copy revisions. I'll also need to add some CSS to make things breathe a little more, but I wanted to get something up.

Anyway, the plugin is now available for testing on cdev.

For those that are unable to test on cdev, here are some screenshots of the new features:

1. Widget settings - https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/attachments/9043/license-widget-options.png
2. Post settings - https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/attachments/9046/license-post-options.png
3. Widget display and individual post license - https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/attachments/9040/license-page.png
4. Group creation - https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/attachments/9041/license-group-create.png
5. Group settings - https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/attachments/9042/license-group-manage.png
6. Group license display - https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/attachments/9044/license-group.png
7. Site creation - https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/attachments/9045/license-site-create.png

Most websites that use a Creative Commons license do not prominently display the license info. With that in mind, for the group license display, I chose to add the license to the bottom of the group page.

For the individual post license, I've chosen to display the license in the post footer if the license widget is inactive or if the license widget is visible and if the post license differs from the site license.

I also found time to add the license to the "Create a Site" page. Ignore the empty "Site Template" section as I do not have that properly set up in my local dev environment.

Let me know what you think.