Steve O’Grady of RedMonk announced the Progressive License WordPress plugin at WordCamp San Francisco.

Progressive License is similar to other plugins that allow you to easily put a license on your content, but it brings a little twist: the ability to change the license applied to the content as the content ages.

Steve explains:

In my case, as an example, it applies a Creative Commons noncommercial license for the first 60 days – this one – and then retires the noncommercial provision after that time period, applying this license on everything older than 60 days.

This is the sort of thing that would have been really simple to build as a one-off custom plugin, but RedMonk instead chose to have my company, Crowd Favorite, build a solution that could be distributed back to the community.

This was an interesting user interaction challenge. We did our best to make this definition of the license time windows as user friendly as possible.

You can see we created a JavaScript based configuration page that does some date calculation to show when licenses would be applied to a post published today. Hopefully this does a good job communicating how the various licenses will be applied.

Progressive License ships with seven Creative Commons licenses included out of the box, but also gives you an interface to add additional licenses you would like to use.

Many thanks to RedMonk for bringing us in to build this plugin, and kudos to them for choosing to sponsor the creation of a robust solution for the rest of the WordPress community.