One week ago, my laptop's harddisk broke down during the afternoon. I had been accustomed to occasional data loss before — sometimes, pictures would be garbled and on one incident, a 100 MB sound file was corrupted and could not be copied. However, as the kernel printed unpleasant warnings during every startup, aborting the normal boot process, insisting that the file system was damaged, I decided it was the proper time to panic and check the backups.

Getting a replacement drive took me several days. As I did not have money to spare, my first hurdle was activating the GsoC prepaid card. To make it short, I was not able to activate the card using the error-prone web site, but succeeded in doing it by phone. When I finally held the new hard drive in my hands, I felt like an RPG character, who had in a side quest acquired the item necessary to continue his main endeavour; on sunday, almost all backups were applied.

Regarding the plugin, I have fixed a number of small bugs and also added several new features, listed below:

• Default licensing : Users can now choose a license that gets applied to every attachment if they do not choose a specific license.
• Post thumbnail figures : Wordpress post thumbnails can now be embedded as figures with annotated markup, just like inline content. Since many theme authors do not properly filter the markup returned by the Wordpress function the_post_thumbnail() (and similar ones), expecting only an < img> element, this option is disabled by default.
• Fallback links for multimedia content : < audio>, < video> and < object> elements now sport a fallback link for browsers that do not support HTML5.
• Support for alternate content and plugin directories : Since Wordpress 2.6, you can change the names of the wp-content and plugins directories; earlier versions of the plugin did not cope with that. I had struggled with this issue before, but after Moritz Metz provided a working default configuration for wp-config.php , everything fell into place fast.
• New stylesheet : I modified the existing grau style, using 80×15 icons. I am pondering setting it as the standard stylesheet for the plugin. This is how it looks:

For this week, I will focus on making default licensing more expansive, adding differing license options for different types of media content and maybe even for single users. I will also try to modify the existing stylesheets so they work well with post thumbnail figures. As Nathan Kinkade suggested, I may expand the scope of the plugin to also manage licensing metadata of pages and posts. [MB]: Megabyte [ GsoC]: Google Summer of Code [RPG]: Role-Playing Game [HTML]: Hypertext Markup Language