wpLicense 0.5 is out. wpLicense is a project I whipped up a while back to experiment with the Creative Commons web services and AJAX. I also needed CC licensing for WordPress and wasn’t satisfied with the existing solutions. This is the third release I’ve made, and the first I actually think should be usable by the world at large.

The relatively large increase in version number (up 3/10ths as opposed to my usual 1/10th of a version) reflects the large number of changes as well as the amount of testing that went into this version.

In the bug-fix category:

• Unbeknownst to me, my web host uses PHP 5 by default, so I happily used PHP 5-specific features such as SimpleXML without knowing it. Unfortunately, lots of people still use PHP 4, so some refactoring was in order. This release supports PHP 4 (> 4.3 for sure, possibly older although I won’t guarantee it).
• I had also used libcurl in the previous version, which while it existed in PHP 4 wasn’t always turned on. We’re using a little more braindead way of calling the webservice now that should work with non-libcurl-enabled installations of PHP.
• Finally, we fixed a rather annoying bug that caused the generic jurisdiction Attribution licenses to be issued as 2.0, even though 2.5 is the current version. Feh.

This release also adds a new configuration option: “Include license badge in default footer”. If you use the default WordPress theme (or probably 90% of the other themes out there that call wpfooter(); ), checking this saves you the hassle of manually editting your template. The template functions are still available for manipulating and displaying the license information in other ways, this just seemed like a logical addition to make life easier.

All this combined with some (but not lots, mind you) UI-lovin’ means that anyone using an old version (yes, both of you) should go ahead and upgrade. Go on, check it out.