Django Content License

Django Content License is a simple app that allows you to associate a content license with a model instance and display appropriate attribution in your HTML templates.

Note

There is already a published package similar in purpose to this one: django-licensing. Please see the quick comparison below for why I chose to create a new one.

What's included?

License Model

A simple License model that can be associated with any other model in your project. The License model stores the following information:

• name: The name of the license (e.g. CC-BY-4.0, CC0 1.0, MIT, etc.)
• description: A description of the license
• text: The full text of the license
• URL: A Canonical URL for the license

LicenseField

A LicenseField that subclasses ForeignKey and points towards the licensing.License model.

• Sets default translatable verbose_name and help_text for the field
• Sets default on_delete behavior of models.PROTECT to ensure that licenses cannot be deleted if they are associated with any database entries
• Adds a get_FOO_display method to the model that returns an HTML snippet containing attribution information for the associated database entry

Quickstart

Install Django Content License:

pip install django-content-license

Add it to your INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'licensing',
    ...
)

add a LicenseField to any of your models:

from django.db import models
from licensing.field import LicenseField

class MyModel(models.Model):
    ...
    license = LicenseField()
    ...

then, make sure to run makemigrations and migrate to apply the changes to your database.

That's it. Now you can access the license information for any instance of your model in your templates:

{{ mymodel.get_license_display }}

Comparison with django-licensing

django-licensing is a package that provides similar functionality to this package. It was created some 10 years ago, was last released in 2014 and last updated in 2020. Regardless, it probably gets the job done in most cases. However, there were some implementation details that I didn't site well with me and some more capabilities that I wanted to add.

Things I didn't like

• It require you to subclass an abstract Licensed model in your own project.
• The Licensed model provides a FK to the License model which hardcodes the on_delete to models.CASCADE. This means that if your DB admin deletes a license (perhaps by mistake), they will also delete any database entries that are associated with that license. Yikes!
• django-licensing does not store the full license text. Having the full text allows us to provide the entire license with any content downloads.
• No descriptions of licenses provided.
• Included initial data are long outdated.

What this package does instead

• Include licenses in your models via a custom Django field, rather than subclassing an abstract model.
• Provide sensible field defaults for verbose_name, help_text, and on_delete which can all be overridden if desired.
• on_delete defaults to models.PROTECT to ensure that licenses cannot be accidentally deleted if they are associated with existing database entries.
• Provide a default get_FOO_display method that returns an HTML snippet containing attribution information for the associated database entry.
• Store the full license text in the database.
• Provide helpful description of each license.
• Provides initial data that includes the latest Creative Commons licenses (v4.0).

Contributing

Check out the the contributing guidelines in CONTRIBUTING.md for more details on how to contribute to this project.

Credits

See AUTHORS.md for a list of contributors to this project and appropriate credits.