Adding Dublin Core metadata to WordPress posts
Automated disclaimer: This post was written more than 15 years ago and I may not have looked at it since.
Older posts may not align with who I am today and how I would think or write, and may have been written in reaction to a cultural context that no longer applies. Some of my high school or college posts are just embarrassing. However, I have left them public because I believe in keeping old web pages alive—and it's interesting to see how I've changed.
WordPress does not have a built-in mechanism for automatically adding standardized metadata to pages. Today I wrote a plugin to add Dublin Core metadata to all posts and pages. It currently supports the following metadata:
- Site name as DC.publisher
- Site URL as DC.publisher.url
- Post title as DC.title
- Permalink as DC.identifier
- Date created as DC.date.created
Install it by downloading the latest version from the DC 4 WP page (version 0.2 at this time), unpacking the .zip archive, and dropping the .php file into your WordPress installation's wp-content/plugins folder.
This is my first plugin, so any and all constructive feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Newer versions and changelog
(This was originally a separate page, but I moved it here in 2020 for archiving.)
This plugin implements some Dublin Core metadata elements for WordPress.
Download the current version (0.4) as a zipped php file.
Specification
Features a small admin screen in Options. (Allows admin to set License metadata.)
Adds the following Dublin Core metadata elements to posts and pages:
- Site name as DC.publisher
- Site URL as DC.publisher.url
- Post title as DC.title
- Permalink as DC.identifier
- Date created as DC.date.created
- Author name as DC.creator
- Categories as DC.subject (semicolon delimited, excludes default category)
- If WordPress 2.1 or higher, DC.language
- If license is set, DC.rights.license
- If license is set, author name as DC.rights.rightsHolder
Future work
At some point I'd like to add in the following metadata elements:
- Post subtitle as DC.title (again)
- Date modified as DC.date.modified
- Tags (of Ultimate Tag Warrior) as DC.subject? Perhaps.
Change log
Version 0.4
Released on 2007-1-27, version 0.4 [zip format] adds DC.language, DC.rights.rightsHolder, and DC.rights.license. Joan Junyent has joined the list of contributors. Default category is now excluded.
Version 0.3.1
Released on 2007-1-11, version 0.3.1 [zip format] adds DC.creator and DC.subject, thanks to Salvatore Vassallo's version 0.3.
Version 0.2
Released on 2006-10-1, version 0.2 [zip format] includes basic DC support but has no admin interface. It supports the following metadata elements:
- Site name as DC.publisher
- Site URL as DC.publisher.url
- Post title as DC.title
- Permalink as DC.identifier
- Date created as DC.date.created
Brain on Fire » Blog Archive » My first collaboration! says:
[...] A while back I wrote a very simple plugin for WordPress that would automatically insert Dublin Core metadata into the header of my blog posts. I released it under a free license (as version 0.2) with the hope that someone more proficient in WordPress than I would come along and build on my work. And someone did! [...]
Saket says:
Hey. Thanks for writing the plugin, I've just installed it.
But I have a question, in its settings page, what am I supposed to write in "Add metadata dublincore License:" ?
Tim McCormack says:
Saket: If you have a license for your posts (such as some Creative Commons license) you can put that information there.
ashok says:
Hi, this is a very useful plugin, however it takes into account only some of the dc parameter. there was one issue regarding author metadata. even if i fill in the author information in the plugin, the header shows defalut author as admin. Also no provision for adding multiple authors, authors affiliation, etc. thanks again for this plugin