Given all our product and documentation is open, we should encourage and support silverstripe website developers and website maintainers to use creative commons licenses, too. For instance, we've made it publicly known that the User Help Guide content at is under the attribution creative commons license.

But where should we start? What is most useful to people? What aspects of putting the creative commons ideals into other webbased systems has been popular to date? My primary day-to-day experience with Creative Commons is specifying it in flickr photos...

Examples:

1 - When you insert an image or PDF into your page editor, should we make it easy for you to describe your license of that file? Is it possible for the file itself to hold that information, and should we "read" or "write" it to that file, as well? This could mean that a link could look like this;

Download The SilverStripe User Guide (PDF)

(But perhaps with a little more style and flair)

But is there a microformat to semantically associate a link to a PDF, with a creative commons license? Something along the lines of <a href="MyLifesWork.pdf" rel="license:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/">; but that doesn't offend W3C, Tantek, and trolls... I see only the item I mention below, which doesn't work for this situation.

2 - For any page of your website, you could specify the license of that page; in other words, whether you feel that page's content is copyright, shareable, etc. This would set inside the CMS along side the other meta data of a page (like search engine keywords).

Creative Commons suggest you mark this up on your page with RelLicense:

"This text is licensed to the public under the <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/">Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License</a>."

But, in my opinion, this isn't good enough. The above HTML doesn't semantically specify what text is under that license. This preceeding paragraph? The parent DIV? Everything on this webpage?

Its as though we need a meta element convention to describe an entire page (e.g. <meta name="ccLicense" content="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/" />)
and a way to specify the license for abitrary content within a page. (If we did this, we wouldn't need a convention for linked PDFs and images, btw). But how we mark this up?

<div ThisIsMyTextDontUseIt><h1>Page Title</h1><p>Secret Formula</p></div>
<div ThisDivIsCreativeCommonsAttrib2.5><h2>a heading half way down the page</h2><p>lots of</p><p>text</p></div>

3 - For the flickr gallery module to fetch photos only of a certain license (Lakshan, does the Flickr API support such an idea?)

4 - Adding a feature to the 'insert image' system of SilverStripe where you can browse for photos on flickr, and when you insert them, for the correct attribution to appear automatically.

From an interface standpoint, it would be good to think through whether its actually more appropriate to specify the license when you go to upload the assets into the system, rather than when you go to insert it into a page.

E.g. a crude, bad interface, but to communicate the idea...

"Choose a file to upload: ..........................." <browse>
The files I upload are under the following license: <dropdown>

<upload button>

Cool, thanks for the insight into the API, and volunteering for the flickr photo inserter
The flickr inserter would have saved my time on yesterday's blog post!